Spooky Dick Cheney, serving up dripping red meat, defending the honor of H

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Spooky Dick Cheney, serving up dripping red meat, defending the honor of Halliburton


http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0429/powers.php

Campaigning in Michigan for the Bush-Cheney ticket last Friday, John McCain introduced the next speaker as a man of "resolve, experience, patriotism," and slyly went on to dub him "very debonair." Needless to say, he was talking about Dick Cheney. Perhaps the most hated figure in an administration crawling with them, Cheney is surely the spookiest veep in American history, a man who spent most of the last three years in some undisclosed location, seemingly unable to decide if he's Dr. No or He Who Must Not Be Named. Now that it's election time, he's turning up everywhere, serving up dripping red meat at Republican fundraisers, defending the honor of the nice folks at Halliburton, and contrary to all evidence, insisting on Saddam's links to 9-11. Oh well, at least William Safire believes him.

Each time Cheney emerges from the shadows, you grasp why he's been wise to spend most of his career there. This became doubly apparent when John Kerry selected John Edwards, whose effervescence perked up that logy campaign like a tall stack of Alka-Seltzer. In contrast, Cheney's been an overdose of Lomotil. When asked who would make a better president, 47 percent said Edwards compared to only 38 percent for Cheney—and half the voters said they didn't know anything about Edwards. Then New York's ex-senator Al D'Amato emerged from the Black Lagoon to float the idea of dumping Cheney. His words were picked up by CNN's Paula Zahn, and soon you were hearing references to the Bad Ticker Scenario—you know, Dick's heart problems would force him to "withdraw." The idea reached its tipping point on July 15 when Elizabeth Bumiller began her article on the dump-Cheney talk by calling it "as ingenious as it is far-fetched"—and The New York Times put it on the front page.

Although the punditry was united in its conviction that the vice president's place on the ticket was secure, this didn't alter the basic facts about his dour unlikability. Cheney's a Wyoming Hobbesian whose doom-laden vision of life as a dog-eat-dog struggle has not only defined our nation's foreign policy but his own public persona. He's become one of our pop culture's sickest jokes. When most Americans under 30 think of Cheney, they picture Eminem electrocuting him with his defibrillator in the great "Without Me" video or Saturday Night Live's Darrell Hammond portraying him as a maniac prone to bursts of mad glee—only half his face can smile.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. When Bush first chose him, he was considered a reassuring Number Two. "His unique talent," writes James Mann in Rise of the Vulcans, "was to convey a sense of soothing solemnity; Cheney could make whatever he said so obvious, reasonable and self-evident that listeners often didn't stop to question it." Moderate in manner if not in essence—his House voting record was to the right of Newt Gingrich's—he developed a mystique as the acme of hard-nosed competence, who could transform an underperforming bureaucracy the way 007 could convert a killer lesbian. Even better, he was reckoned a level-headed adviser, schooled in the catechism of omertà. Think Tom Hagen. (In Showtime's preposterous docudrama D.C. 9/11: Time of Crisis, Bush tells Cheney, "I'm going to need you at my side at all times, consigliere." The veep beams.)

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1. great read.. thanks for posting...

It's amazing how people can know what a creep this guy is, and still think he's competent to act as anything more than a street sweeper, although that's really unfair to street sweepers.