Dick Cheney - The most dangerous man in America

Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman has published his book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, describing Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President America has ever suffered. Much of what Gellman has written is new information for the public.

The story that becomes clear is that Dick Cheney arranged to have himself chosen Vice President by George W. Bush, and from that position has spent the last seven-and-a-half years working to create a Monarchical role of"Commander in Chief" for the American President in which the President is the supreme decision-maker with almost no limitations by any other institution including Congress and the Courts. Except for earlier reports by Gellman this story has also completely escaped the notice of the American media.

The following is an except from the review of "Angler" by Steve Clemons.

Richard Cheney has sculpted the vice presidency in a way never seen before. He revolutionized an office that has turned many of its occupants into obscure eccentrics—one that Benjamin Franklin referred to as “Your Superfluous Excellency.” Cheney refused to do state funerals. Instead, he rerouted the in- and outboxes of power in the White House and turned himself into the nation’s most consequential political force. Whether George W. Bush approved or not, his VP animated most of the controversial policies that will define for decades the Bush II presidency. [Snip]

Cheney was put in charge of finding Bush’s VP, and he positioned himself for selection. He uncovered, through an exhaustive questionnaire process, the most private and intimate details of the lives of the other candidates. No one vetted Cheney, though, so nobody had anything on him. He had the goods on everyone else, and he got the nod from Bush.

The curious way in which Cheney maneuvered himself onto Bush’s ticket is one of many disturbing stories in this new and brilliantly researched account of Cheney’s adventures as Bush’s “No. 2.” Barton Gellman, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist, examines the nuts and bolts of Cheney’s power apparatus. He shows how a mere vice president engineered a massive expansion of presidential power, knocked back the constitutional authority of Congress and the judiciary, helped launch an illegitimate war, developed a system for spying on America’s citizens, oversaw White House-sanctioned torture, and pushed official secrecy to unprecedented levels. We see how Cheney punctured America’s mystique as a benign and respected nation—how he shattered the moral, economic, and military pillars of American power. [Snip]

Gellman ... records previously unknown anecdotes about the inner workings of the administration and Cheney’s take-no-prisoners approach to winning policy battles. While Bush and members of his inner circle like Karl Rove seemed to be obsessed with the political machinations of their work, Cheney had a deeper purpose behind his crusades. For him politics and political gamesmanship, seduction, and intimidation were all about changing the nation’s policy course—all about principle. Cheney['s]... heart and soul were invested in the most important and controversial aspects of the Bush presidency, the policy areas he cared about most—terrorism, intelligence, national security, energy, environmental policy, tax and budget issues.[Snip]

Cheney and his abrasive lawyer David Addington wanted to bring on governmental crises and tensions with Congress in order to demonstrate the dominance and infallibility of presidential power, which they defined as the “unitary executive.” In Gellman’s framing, Cheney saw 9/11, discussions with energy lobbyists, and even torture policy as mere vehicles for asserting his vision of a near monarchical presidency.

Angler leads its readers to think that, even without 9/11, Cheney would have found triggers to justify his imperial expansion of presidential powers and official secrecy, his pugnacious disregard for international law, the huge defense spending increases, the war against Iraq—or whatever nation would show that America was an irresistible force—and the massive tax cuts. Gellman argues that Cheney was never an apostle of neoconservatism. He didn’t have a burning desire to establish democracy in Iraq. For Cheney, John Bolton, Addington, and others, Iraq was but a means to an end—a tool to expand presidential prerogatives. The same does not necessarily apply to Scooter Libby, a leading neoconservative thinker who strongly favored the invasion for ideological reasons.

This book is simply one of the scariest stories ever written about contemporary America. Cheney and Addington essentially hijacked the bureaucracy of national security and put themselves in the cockpit of government. In chapter after chapter, we read how Cheney set about constructing a secretive system of government and policymaking in which he was accountable to almost no one. We see, for instance, how Cheney pushed through the second round of tax cuts—a move that made even Bush uncomfortable—and how he undermined Christine Todd Whitman, then administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, over laws regarding air quality. [Snip]

Cheney’s maneuvers, his angling inside the wide berth that Bush gave him, eventually created so much blowback from colleagues inside the administration and Congress that his office began to slide off its rails. Gellman relates a telling incident involving this reviewer and the vice president on the subject of North Korea, when it appeared that Cheney was unaware of President Bush’s intention to ask Congress to remove North Korea from the terrorist watch list. (I was not the source of this information: the New York Times reported the encounter between Cheney and me on its front page.) At an off-the-record forum, I asked Cheney about the possible change toward North Korea. The question was simple, but Cheney froze, staring at me for an awkwardly long time. He refused to answer, then left the stage. Gellman suggests that Cheney, who for years had been wired into every key national-security decision and able to paralyze nearly all policies with which he disagreed, had been left out—“not read in,” according to the lingo—of the policy-making process, the very tactic his team had so often used against their rivals.

Cheney was also frustrated on the Iran front, increasingly convinced that his team was losing in the interagency process to State Department officials R. Nicholas Burns, Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Gates. He felt his hawkish, more militarily focused strategy was being undermined by advocates of diplomacy. In a Salon article on Sept. 19, 2007, “Why Bush Won’t Attack Iran,” I disclosed that a senior member of Cheney’s team had said that the vice president was considering ways to “tie the president’s hands” and outflank those delaying a confrontation with Tehran—a policy that Cheney felt amounted to appeasement. Clearly, the Angler’s influence was declining. Some sources suggest that Cheney still wields great power and has of late been winning his battles again against Rice, Bellinger, Gates, and others. But he is certainly a long way from his halcyon first years in office, when he had virtually nothing stopping him.

[highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]

This looks like a book that explains a great deal of the inner workings - especially the series of blunders - of the Bush White House since January 2001.

Here's a question this review triggers. A great many people have anticipated that Bush will create some form of "October Surprise" between now and the Presidential election in order to get McCain elected President. But if Cheney has been the primary motivator of so many of the White House activities, is Cheney either interested or in a position to cause some kind of international incident in the next two weeks? What is the relationship between McCain and Cheney?

I have written a great deal about the Reagan Revolution, its underlying conservative ideology, and the manner in which the Reagan Revolution has led directly to the present credit crisis and Recession. Gellman's book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, suggests that behind the scenes of - and perhaps even mostly unrelated to - the current economic crises there has been a very different mechanism for many of the disasters that have been created by the Bush administration. I suspect that this book will be the basis for a lot of the defenses created by conservatives to avoid blame for the disastrous state that America has been brought down to. It won't wash. Dick Cheney and his acolytes have been a key element of Republican dominance for the last three decades and especially so since 2001. The Conservatives who will be wanting to distance themselves from him are the same ones who linked arms and supported his actions in lockstep, just as the social conservatives have. Conservatives are driven as much be social cronyism as they are by their myth of ideology. They just don't like to look at that aspect of being a conservative.

A Review of a book is supposed to sell people on the idea of buying and reading it. Steve Clemon's review has succeeded.