Quotes for the Week (Lest We Forget)

Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney is trying to polish his image as he gets oh-so-gently interviewed on television about his new book. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has this to say about Dick Cheney:

• "He wanted desperately to be president of the United States... he knew the Texas governor was not steeped in anything but baseball, so he knew he was going to be president and I think he got his dream. He was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration."
  
  
• "He's developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as 'exploding heads all over Washington' because that's the way someone who's decided he's not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let's get out in front of everybody, let's act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him." Both quotes quoted by Elspeth Reeve for The Atlantic Wire, Powell Aide: Cheney was President 'For All Practical Purposes'," posted 30 Aug. 2011.

Dahlia Lithwick reminds us that "until there are legal consequences for those who order or engage in torture, we will only be pretending. Cheney is the beneficiary of that artifice." And that's the tragedy:

Most of us do not want warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, or war against every dictator who looks at us funny. We may be bloodthirsty, but we aren't morons. On his most combative and truly lawless positions, Cheney still stands largely alone.

The tragedy is that it doesn't matter if we are all Cheneyites now. That there is even one Cheney is enough. He understands and benefits from the fact that the law is still all on his side; that there is only heated rhetoric on ours. As John Adams famously put it, the United States was intended to be a government of laws, not of men. Dick Cheney is living proof that if we are not brave enough to enforce our laws, we will forever be at the mercy of a handful of men.

And Conor Friedersdorf reminds us why Americans loathe Cheney (except those, perhaps, who frequented the cocktail circuit with him in Washington, D.C.; amazing how close proximity to power blunts the moral nerve endings--my observation, not Friedersdorf's). Friedersdorf's blog post titled "Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney" is based on the investigative reporting and writing of several people, including Wil S. Hylton, Barton Gellman, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage, and Jack Balkin. Friedersdorf ends his numerical march down memory lane with this gem:

Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.

After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail. Thus his unpopularity circa 2008, when he left office.

Good riddance.

[my emphasis]