Some days, there’s just no forgetting that Dick Cheney is still the vice president of the United States. We’ve had a few of these recently, with Cheney traveling to Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East on what might be called a goodwill mission, if the person making the trip were not Dick Cheney.
Many startling comments tumbled from the vice president’s lips. His verbal jousting with ABC’s Martha Raddatz over the recent National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that Iran had stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon around 2003 is one scary discussion. Examining this back-and-forth, you cannot help but conclude that Cheney does not put much stock in the NIE, and considers there to be little, if any, difference between the ongoing Iranian uranium enrichment program and a weapons program. It is all eerily reminiscent of the lack of distinction Cheney made between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the band of Afghanistan-based terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Of course, Cheney uses the interview to deliver the obligatory shake of his saber in Iran’s direction: “The president has made it clear that our objective is to make certain they do not acquire the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.”
Cheney also declared that it didn’t really matter that two-thirds of Americans think the Iraq war wasn’t worth fighting-”So?” the vice president responded. After all, real leaders in a democracy don’t give a hoot about what the people think and don’t follow those cursed opinion polls. Given a second chance a few days later to elaborate on his point, Cheney likened President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon.
It takes one to know one, sort of.
Cheney is the most Nixonian figure in American politics since-well, since Nixon. You could say that he speaks with some authority about that era, marked as it was by abuse of presidential power, an obsession with secrecy and the continuation of a disastrous war in Vietnam that cost thousands of American lives and cleaved the nation into political factions that have never fully reconciled.
But it is not the discredited Nixon administration to which Cheney compares the current Bush tenure. He compares it to the brief presidency of the decent Ford. Cheney, who served as Ford’s White House chief of staff, correctly points out that Ford paid a political price for ignoring public opinion and granting Nixon a pardon for his Watergate crimes in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation.
“The country was better off for what Gerry Ford did that day. And 30 years later, everybody recognized it,” Cheney told Raddatz. “I have the same strong conviction” that history will assess the Bush decision to invade and occupy Iraq in a similarly favorable light. In 30 years, Cheney said of Bush, “it will be clear that he made the right decisions.”
Some foreign policy scholars already view the Iraq misadventure as the single most costly foreign policy blunder in contemporary American history. Perhaps three decades from now the consensus will be different.
But that is not what strikes hard and deep in the jarring, even contemptible analogy that Cheney makes. The Nixon pardon was an entirely political decision, made for purely political reasons, and which cost Ford nothing but political support. No geopolitical catastrophe was set in motion when Ford decided that in order to govern, he had to remove the stain of Watergate from the front pages and the television screens.
No historical hindsight is needed to see that, unlike in Iraq, no lives were lost or bodies shattered by the Watergate pardon. No families were ruined emotionally and financially. No civilians were forced to flee their own country, or to become refugees within it. No thousands of prisoners were incarcerated without hope of charge or trial, and none were tortured.
Ford unquestionably had the power, as president, to pardon Nixon. No such right exists for Bush’s unconstitutional overreaching in Iraq and in the larger war on terror. No president has the unilateral power to imprison and detain people indefinitely-the Supreme Court already has said so. No president has the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans engaged in communications with people overseas; there was a law against this very sort of thing when Bush began his surveillance program.
In fact, the only similarity between Nixon’s Watergate era and the present one-a similarity Cheney inadvertently drew too well-is the cynicism and dishonesty at the heart of each.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco@washpost.com.
© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
Cheney is bad enough. Our job is to prevent the next “Nixon heir”, which is McCain, if elected.
I’ve said before on this site that my grandparents voted for Nixon in 1968 because they were Republican conservatives. They were also straight arrow old folks who never ever uttered cuss words. Had they known then what historians have told us in books later about Nixon’s private (not much covered in media in those days foul mouth and ill temper, they never would have voted for him in a million years. McCain’s mouth and temper are similar to Nixon’s—and modern media makes this very well known. As the saying goes, “Listen, then, if you have ears to hear with.”
Nixonlike is Nixonlike. We need to not buy it this time.
The only thing different in 30 years will be that cheney will be dead. He doesn’t care what people’s opinions are now or in 30 years. I can’t imagine that Iraq will be a pillar of democracy in 3 decades. Then again, it might be if it was cheney’s democracy.
The US would have been better off if Nixon had spent a couple years in a federal penitentiary for obstruction of justice. It would have cured us of this royalist notion that the (Republican) president must be above the law.
Cheney constantly reaffirms what is known by most who have been paying attention — he left the “reality-based community” long ago and has no intention of ever going back.
I’m starting to get a pretty poor impression of this fella Cheney. He transfers hundreds of billions from the public purse to his cronies while having more than a million civilians murdered. He’s immune to facts or remorse. He shoots you in the face and you have to apologize.
Nice choice. Hail to the electorate!
So Dick, that means that if you don’t listen to the people, your employers, then you’re not really employed by the people. You’ve sold out your people and your country and you are now a traitor and a dictator. Maybe your heart will give out before they hang you. Maybe not.
Thirty years from now, people will be a lot smarter than they are now, thanks in no small part to the internet. I doubt they will think you a hero as some of the corporate media brainwashed today may think of Nixon. But who knows? By then maybe you will also control the internet.
I’m not sure that Ford had the power to pardon Nixon. The constitution says that the president has the power to pardon, except in cases of impeachment. I think that the founders may have intended, not only to avoid having a president pardon himself, but also to avoid having a successor pardon a corrupt president. But perhaps I’m not familiar enough with the events of the time: Was there ever a Supreme Court challenge of Ford’s pardon of Nixon? Did anyone see it, at the time, as a possible constitutional crisis? If impeachment hearings were underway, and if they recommended that the senate have a trial, then could that trial have proceeded? Or is the general idea that, once he’s out of office, he could be tried for high crimes, but since he resigned, his successor could pardon him? We should have an amendment that would give congress the power to continue impeachment hearings, and the senate the power to go ahead with a trial, even if an executive resigns in the midst of the process (probably to be pardoned by a VP). If I’m not mistaken, I think that the founding fathers started us off with a system in which the loser (or the second-place finisher) in the presidential race became the VP, in which case the VP may be less motivated to pardon the pres. Now that we have a two-party system with two names on the ticket, and we vote for the whole ticket, the impeachment-pardon dynamics are a bit different.
I think it’s amendment time. Let’s see if we can get it done before the coming ice age.
Dick Cheney is a great big stain on the blue dress of American politics. It is too bad he just won’t go away, get impeached, arrested, or anything to keep him from doing our country more harm.
Ms Cocco is wrong. Ford may have been a decent man once, but there was nothing decent in his pardoning of Nixon. Nor was it legal. After all, Nixon was neither convicted nor charged with a crime. Pardon for what?
Impeachment would have aired many of the secrets that never saw the light of day. The cancer in the body politic that is Bush’s presidency may never have happened without that pardon.
As to “the band of Afghanistan-based terrorists who attacked us on 9/11,” well, the jury is still out on that one, isn’t it?
PF-Flyer,
The full House of Representatives never actually voted on impeaching Nixon. If my memory is correct (and it IS better than Mrs. Clinton’s) the Judiciary Committee under Peter Rodino voted unanimously on three articles of impeachment. Nixon resigned before those articles moved to the House floor — so the Constitutional ban against pardons in the case of an impeachment wouldn’t apply. I don’t have enough expertise to answer the rest of your questions.
Still, a few years in Leavenworth would have been very painful for the country in the short term — and as militantliberal says, a good thing long term.
skeezyks March 27th, 2008 1:18 pm
You are one smart ‘person’. “The cancer in the body politic that is Bush’s presidency may never have happened without that pardon.”
I was there. They said it plain - if you work to destroy Democracy you will be taken care of. If you stand in the way, you will be ritually defamed, falsely imprisoned, or executed without process of law. (The Master’s boys were busy killing “Dissidents” in those days as well)
You also wrote:
“As to “the band of Afghanistan-based terrorists who attacked us on 9/11,” well, the jury is still out on that one, isn’t it?”
I’m still trying to figure out how Kerosene (burns at 1400c) melts structural steel (melts at 2800c). Or how a building that was untouched by ‘anything’ falls down like a controlled demolition, all…by…itself. But I’m just a Citizen, what could any of us possibly know about anything. Right.
Bad meat always smells. You may not know how it died or when, but bad meat always smells. Right now, America smells like an abattoir in July.
But here’s the question I’ve been asking myself. Chris Hedges has been asking the same thing:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/i…ious_objection/
“As a result, when you put this cocktail together, becoming more Republican to get Republican votes and hanging on to the left because they have nowhere to go, you set up a tug in the direction of the corporations. There is no discernable end to this strategy by the left. When you ask the left they say not this year, sometime later. But when? If it is not now, if it is sometime in the future, when? What is their breaking point? If you do not have a breaking point you are a slave.”
“If you do not have a breaking point you are a slave.”
Pieces of 8.
One would think that simple justice would absolutely demand that Bush, Cheny, Rice, and a few others answer for their crimes and spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. But I understand that a paragraph in the military commissions act has already given them “preventative” immunity from prosecution for anything done after Sept 11, 2001.
Lord Vader is pulling the old bait & switch. An unjust war does not equal an unjust pardon.
Bear in mind, it has also been 33 yrs since the defeat in Vietnam. Has anyone come to see that as a good idea in hindsight?
Marie Cocco writes “He compares it to the brief presidency of the decent Ford. Cheney, who served as Ford’s White House chief of staff, correctly points out that Ford paid a political price for ignoring public opinion and granting Nixon a pardon for his Watergate crimes in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation.”
The “decent” Ford, continued to supply arms to Indonesia who had the secret OK from Nixon and Ford to Indonesia to illegally invade the tiny island of East Timor in 1974, who subsequently killed 1/3 of its entire population over a 25-year period, as did three additional U.S. presidents, ending with Clinton — who wrongfully claimed credit for the Indonesian military finally leaving East Timor in 1999. While Ford is often spoken of in terms of good and decent, as Marie Cocco does in her article here, the good and “decent” Ford didn’t seem to have a problem with another sovereign nation being illegally invaded, didn’t have a problem with the killing of 200,000 East Timorese civilians, and didn’t have a problem in keeping that secret from the public.
Gotta agree with Skyeezyks, lucylefty, and NancyH–Marie Cocco shows either her ignorance of or complicity with the establishment by calling Gerald Ford “decent”.
A better appraisal came from Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive who titled his obituary on Ford “The Good Die Young” (Ford was 93 when he passed).
I think the reason the Supreme Court never looked into Ford’s pardon of Nixon was because “the country needed to heal itself” following Watergate. Those in the establishment wanted to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and letting this pardon go through meant just letting the whole thing go away. Besides, rich white dudes very rarely go to prison (except for Colson, Liddy, Mitchell et. al)
“The Office of Vice President Dick Cheney told an agency within the National Archives that for purposes of securing classified information, the Vice President’s office is not an ‘entity within the executive branch…”
See, DC does not consider himself a “vice-president” at all, and since he appointed himself non-vice-president he’s clearly been “president” in all but official title. Hell, it’s not like he (or his boss) were elected or anything in the first place.
So, since he considers himself, basically, a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States Inc, he, like any CEO, could give a shit what anyone beneath him thinks. Or feels. Or is slightly concerned about. When he was “CEO” of Halliburton, his “management” style was simple - you don’t like it? Go f**k yourself and find another job.
And now that his career is all but finished, he’s reminding us that he has BIG plans for his going away party, to which We The People are not invited.
“Ford unquestionably had the power, as president, to pardon Nixon. No such right exists for Bush’s unconstitutional overreaching in Iraq and in the larger war on terror.”
Actually it is not so clear that Ford had the power to pardon Nixon when he did. A pardon normally occurs after there is a criminal conviction, and the pardon removes the sentence and prevents a reindictment for the same charge. In Nixon’s case, Nixon had not been convicted of anything. In American jurisprudence, Nixon, like any other unconvicted American, was legally innocent because he had not been found guilty through due process. Being legally innocent (because he had not been convicted of a crime), the notion of “pardon” in the absence of a criminal conviction is a logical contradiction, an oxymoron.
Those who defend the Ford “pardon” of a non-existent criminal conviction, stretch the definition to mean what is called “prospective pardon”. That is, an advance pardon before a conviction. The problem is this is legally questionable.
Taking the Ford pardon of Nixon as a precedent, one could logically imagine some american president simply blanket advance pardoning all members of his or her administration for all crimes they may have committed or will commit. (”will commit” wasn’t part of the Ford pardon, but who would stop a president from expanding the definition slightly further?)
Of course Ford’s term as president itself was also constitutionally questionable, though the issue is hardly ever raised. I recall a lawyer’s argument at the time of LBJ succeeding JFK (don’t recall the name of the lawyer) that the framers of the Constitution intended in their wording, in the event of death or incapacity of a President, for the vice president to be acting president only temporarily until a new election could be held to elect a new president. The idea was not that the vice president would serve out the rest of the dead president’s term. Supposedly this was done differently than the framers’ intentions when Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison, and has never been seriously challenged since.
History…
Ike and Dick
JFK and LBJ
Nixon and Agnew-Ford
Ray Gun and Shrub
Slick and Monika
Shrub and Dick
…is an unending nightmare
The wars. The economy. The Nation.
What shall we do here on Earth?
Will our Warlocks-In-Chief hold another
Sacred Seance in the Pentagram to
Sacrifice our Children, Treasures and Trust
With the Holy Smoke and Mirrors and Chants
Of “Tax Cuts for the Rich” and “Hold the Course” again?
Will that appease an Avoricious GOP
Or an Insatiable MIC?
I’ll put my trust in Gold and Euros.
Whirling and whirling, the center cannot hold
Things fall apart and the Mill of Gods grinds to a halt.
The four posts of God’s Great House collapse.
…Done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
History turns over. The American Drean, again.
Awake, Dreamers!
A man who kills by the thousands and commands armies finds no sport in hunting small birds. It was a man that Cheney knowingly aimed for through the brush on the Armstrong ranch, a world unto its own in Texas, and a man that he intended to shoot. But he hit the wrong man, a “friend,” and not the captured illegal alien set loose like a scared fox for the pleasures of the drunken sportsmen from Washington, DC.
http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr80.html
Dick Cheney is a man obsessed with blood lust. His fun is found in killing. His job has allowed him to “have fun” by orchestrating the deaths of literally millions of human beings over the last 3 decades. He is mentally ill, a danger to the public, and should be incarcerated. We all know why this has not happened, of course.
The government that still calls itself the United States is nothing more than a front for greedy murderous disconnected corporate thugs. Whether they do it consciously or not, anyone working in the machine is furthering the agenda of enslaving us all. I wish people would quit their corporate jobs and boycott the slavemasters and purveyors of goods made by slaves (walmart, banana republic, nike, levi strauss, etc etc). But “Americans” who are the most overfed under nourished, over entertained undereducated people in the world, are not uncomfortable enough yet.
Last week someone exclaimed to me in great distress that “gas could reach $5 a gallon!” It was all I could do not to laugh in their face. If that is the worst thing that happens that would be fine, but the extortionists at places like Exxon Mobil, The Federal Reserve and their ilk are happily milking the populace while racking up profit at a rate which is beyond obscene, and those profits are then invested in weapons and war, continuing a cycle of greed murder and lies. The Fed is in fact a private organization, not an arm of government; an interesting piece of learning for me.
I am ranting now…it’s so frustrating to watch all this go down.
I did drive across the northern US recently and wherever I went people were anxious to talk about how angry they are at having been so ripped off by Bush & Co. Now if they would be willing to strike, go into the street, and refuse to be manipulated and lied to anymore.
This rogues gallery currently running the US government should be rounded up, indicted, and tried by a jury of fellow citizens (if they are tried by their rich corporate peers we know what will happen). I’d like to see juries made up of people of color, people living in poverty and without healthcare in what was once the richest nation on earth.
I wish I wish that the folks in Congress had the integrity and courage to do their jobs and uphold the constitution. Unfortunately, besides a handful of folks, most of those in Congress (I almost said “serving” but most of them are serving primarily themselves and the corporations to whom they have sold themselves) are complicit, coerced, and corrupt.
The term “corporate whore” is, frankly, an insult to whores.
Actually, there’s another connection. Cheney was there for all of it. Whaddya wanna bet he strongly urged Ford to issue the pardon?