Pufferfish

Not Helping

James Carville and Stanley Greenberg are out with a new poll showing that, despite his recent media blitzkrieg, the former Vice President is doing more harm than good to the Republican Party:

Dick Cheney’s persistent visibility does not appear to be helping matters for the Republicans. With a net favorability of -20 (31 percent favorable, 51 percent unfavorable), the former vice president is at his lowest level of popularity since Democracy Corps first measured it in 1999. Cheney is a deeply divisive figure, popular only with the conservative base of the Republican Party but unpopular with everyone else, including independents (among whom he has net -26 favorability rating) and moderate Republicans. In fact, President Obama (+5) is more popular with moderate Republicans than Cheney (-9).

There has been speculation that the "Listen to Me Tour" is a sign he is gearing up for a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.  Though his recent actions would certainly go a long way in shoring up the party base any candidate would require in securing the nomination, Cheney is not and will not be making another bid for the White House.  He could care less about the White House or the future viability of the Republican Party.  He's simply an arrogant asshole who is worried about improving his own damaged legacy.  His hubris, however, will be at the expense of the eventual Republican nominee in 2012.  And if this data holds, his pride will be to the detriment of Republicans during the midterm elections next year.  I say keep on keepin' on, Dick...  

What You Make Of It

The Bully is hedging on the effectiveness of torture. Which recalls that one of the overriding lessons from the Bush years is that the administration believed how they were perceived depended largely on the length they were willing to go to create their own reality. On rare moments when the press actually called Bush and Cheney on their factually impaired worldview, they simply ignored the criticism. And that strategy helped get them reelected:

Cheney's insistence that "history" will vindicate his actions, despite his off-the-charts unpopularity, also seems hubristic, if not delusional. As Armey told Gellman, this boast seems to be an important source of solace for the former vice president. It cannot be refuted, of course, because no one can foresee with certainty the retrospective judgments of future generations. It is a Cheneyesque belief--one that can never be tested by reality. By explicitly placing more trust in the unobservable than the observable, Cheney seems to be confirming the suspicions of those who see his exaggerated self-confidence as a symptom of chronic disconnection from reality.

Lincoln said, optimistically, that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. But a better epitaph for Cheney's vice presidency comes from Joseph Schumpeter: even if you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, you can fool enough people long enough to do irreversible damage. Whatever hypotheses we entertain or reject about Cheney's motives and mental states, the consequences of his serial duplicities continue to misshape our world and will not, by any means, be soon repaired.

The Shadow Presidency

Oh to be a frustrated, hippie hating staffer in the office of Reps. Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. The young Republican understudies should be taking over starring roles for the GOP. But Dick Cheney won't get off the stage. Yesterday he gave an interview to Larry Kudlow on the state of the economy, of all things. I get why the old nut won't shut up about the torture debate. He can't let events slide away from him and needs to keep it as politicized as possible. Letting moderates in either party get too comfortable with the idea of an investigation would be suicide. But waxing philosophical on the merits of trickle down economics? At first I wasn't paying any attention to the talk about Cheney running in 2012. Now I'm wondering if there's something to it. Then again, it's usually unwise to try and decipher the intentions of a crazy person. Power is a drug. It can overwhelm and corrupt, leaving you desperate for another taste. Nobody knows that better than Dick Cheney.

Betting On Disaster

Here's a bit more from the self-righteous absolutism espoused by Cheney yesterday:

In the event of another terrorist attack on America, the Homeland Security Department assures us it will be ready for this, quote, “man-made disaster” – never mind that the whole Department was created for the purpose of protecting Americans from terrorist attack.

And when you hear that there are no more, quote, “enemy combatants,” as there were back in the days of that scary war on terror, at first that sounds like progress. The only problem is that the phrase is gone, but the same assortment of killers and would-be mass murderers are still there. And finding some less judgmental or more pleasant-sounding name for terrorists doesn’t change what they are – or what they would do if we let them loose.

Yes, Cheney is scared. But make no mistake, he is also laying the groundwork for an "I told you so" response in the wake of a future terrorist attack. In preparation, he's planting the seed that Obama isn't doing everything possible to keep us safe. What we saw yesterday was a man trying to politicize the torture debate while paying forward the terrorism debate.

I've wondered what the GOP response would have been after 9-11 if Al Gore had been president. Would the Exterminator and the Wrestling Coach have sung Cumbaya on the footsteps of the Capitol while locked arm in arm Democrats? Of course not. They would have let every man, woman and child in this country know that liberals can't keep them safe, just as Cheney is doing now.

The GOP's conservatism sees the world in black and white. Grey is for wimps. This isn't all that different than the debate Democrats and Republicans have been having in this country for generations, only now it includes the use of torture. Absolutism in the defense of the country is never a bad thing, says Cheney. Be afraid. Trust me. And go about your normal lives.

This is what you would expect from a monster. This is what we've come to expect from Dick Cheney's Republican Party.

Losing Focus

The debate over what to do with the Gitmo detainees has obscured the reason they're there in the first place:

CNNjust had James Inhofe on talking about how we could not bring the Gitmo folks to the states because they are too dangerous, and it reminded me of something that has been bothering me the last few days. There seems to be an effort to pretend that we chose to put these people in Gitmo for security reasons.

That is simply nonsense on stilts. It was little more than barbed-wire and plywood when we started detaining them there, and we had to build the damned place. We didn’t put the detainees there because it was super secure. We put them there so there would be no controlling legal authority and we could do whatever the hell we wanted with them.

It would be helpful if journalists would point this out. Because Dick Cheney certainly won't. His broadside today of an administration trying to craft its own foreign policy was despicable and as best I can tell, unprecedented. A former veep going after the new administration only a few months after leaving office by way of a formal speech designed to gin up coverage? Here's the part of Cheney's speech I found most enjoyable, which is another way to say completely detached from rational thought:

And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for - our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

As Zachary Roth says, "in other words, the very act of debating torture, or the process by which we try detainees, is encouraging terrorists to strike. The implication, of course, is that dissent of any kind is dangerous." This is rather ironic given that it's Cheney who is the most vocal in his dissent. But why let details get in the way of good old fashioned fear-mongering?