A less-than-accurate description of the situation in Baghdad...

Michael Goldfarb gives a quote from a book I'm going to be reading soon, Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President

...In 2002, the vice president had been briefed on fresh intelligence that members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad had made their way to Iraq and had begun setting up safe houses in Baghdad. Cheney found the report interesting, but odd. He had understood that Egyptian Islamic Jihad had merged with al Qaeda several years earlier. Ayman al Zawahiri, the group’s longtime leader, was now Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy. Cheney wanted to know why the report did not simply conclude that al Qaeda was setting up safe houses in Baghdad.

He returned the report to the CIA with a question: Would it be accurate to substitute “al Qaeda” for every mention of “Egyptian Islamic Jihad?” The answer did not come immediately, but when it did, the CIA finally acknowledged that members of al Qaeda were operating in Baghdad.

To Cheney, the episode was one example of many that demonstrated the unwillingness of some CIA analysts to take an objective look at Iraq and its support for radical Islamic terrorists, al Qaeda in particular. In this case, analysts were so determined to avoid reporting the presence of al Qaeda members in Iraq that they presented Cheney with a less-than-accurate description of the situation in Baghdad...

To me it is one of the most interesting things of our time, the way liberals (and the CIA is very liberal; it's not a place you will find any Republicans) are repelled, as if by some invisible magnetic field, from looking straight at Iraq. They know, and they knew then, back in 2002, that it was the biggest danger to them. That it would unmask them.

They'd been decrying fascism forever, and preening themselves on their anti-Hitler credentials, and then......comes George W Bush who says, "Bully! Let's all go together and overthrow a fascist dictator who makes Adolph Hitler look like a moderate." Ha ha. He got them, the vile phonies.

If President Bush (along with Vice-President Cheney) never accomplished anything else (in fact the list of his accomplishments is a long one) he would be a great president just because he exposed "liberals" and "pacifists" for the nihilists most of them are.

     

One of our gals...

Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard Blog notes the top ten opinion pieces (by page views) of the WaPo for 2007. Who's number one?

Retreat Isn't an Option, By Liz Cheney, January 23, 2007

....We are at war. America faces an existential threat. This is not, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed, a "situation to be solved." It would be nice if we could wake up tomorrow and say, as Sen. Barack Obama suggested at a Jan. 11 hearing, "Enough is enough." Wishing doesn't make it so. We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere, sometime. We can't negotiate with them or "solve" their jihad. If we quit in Iraq now, we must get ready for a harder, longer, more deadly struggle later....

Liz is Dick and Lynne Cheney's daughter. that's her on the right in the picture. (And who's number two in the WaPo? A guy named Kristol.)

We "considered ourselves a vanquished people"

From A Revolutionary Christmas Story, By Lynne Cheney, NYT, December 21, 2004

AS 1776 was drawing to a close, Elkanah Watson, a young man in Massachusetts, expressed what many Americans feared about their war for independence. "We looked upon the contest as near its close," he wrote, "and considered ourselves a vanquished people."

There was good reason for pessimism. The British had driven Gen. George Washington and his men out of New York and across New Jersey. In early December, with the British on their heels, the Americans had commandeered every boat they could find to escape across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. They were starving, sick and cold. The artist Charles Willson Peale, watching the landing from the Pennsylvania shore, described a soldier dressed "in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long and his face so full of sores that he could not clean it." So disfigured was the man, Peale wrote, that at first he did not recognize him as his brother James.

In these desperate circumstances, George Washington made a stunning decision: to go back across the Delaware and launch a surprise attack on the Hessian mercenaries occupying Trenton. On Christmas night, he led 2,400 men, many of them with their feet wrapped in rags because they had no shoes, to a crossing point nine miles upstream from Trenton. As freezing temperatures turned rain to sleet and snow, they began to cross the river.

The task was harder than any of them had imagined. Men had to break through ice to get into the boats and then fend off chunks of floating ice once they were in the river. Getting cannons across - each weighed nearly a ton - was especially difficult. Downstream, two other groups that Washington had ordered to cross the Delaware failed in their mission. But Washington and his men persevered, until finally, at 4 o'clock in the morning, they were across and ready to march to Trenton.

They had planned to approach Trenton before dawn, but the difficulty of the crossing had delayed them, and it was daylight when they encountered the first Hessians. Still, the surprise worked, and in two hours, with few losses of their own, they captured nearly 900 of the enemy. "This is a glorious day for our country," Washington declared... [There's more.]

Can one possibly imagine the elation that must have been felt by Elkanah Watson, when the news of the victory at Trenton arrived? The deep satisfaction we feel right now at the splendid turnaround in Iraq is nothing compared with how Americans must have felt then.

Thank you Lynne Cheney for this one! And we should be very grateful that, even in these last decadent days of America, we have public servants like the Cheney family...

     

Cynical, indeed...

The Vice President's remarks today at Congress...

VPOTUS: I usually avoid press comment when i'm up here, but I felt so strongly about what senator Reid said in the last couple of days that I thought it was appropriate that I come out today and make a statement that I think needs to be made. I thought his speech yesterday was unfortunate, that his comments were uninformed and misleading. Senator Reid has taken many positions on iraq. He has threatened that if the president vetoes the current pending supplemental legislation that he will send up Senator Russ Feingold's bill to defund iraq operations altogether. Yet only last november, Senator Reid said there would be no cut-off of funds for the military in Iraq. So in less than six months time, Senator Reid has gone from pledging full funding for the military, then full funding with conditions, and then a cut-off of funding. Three positions in five months on the most important foreign policy question facing the nation and our troops.

Yesterday, Senator Reid said the troop surge was against the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. That is plainly false. The Iraq Study Group report was explicitly favorable toward a troop surge to secure Baghdad. Senator Reid said there should be a regional conference on Iraq. Apparently he didn't know that there is going to be one next week. Senator Reid said he doesn't have real substantive meetings with the president. Yet immediately following last week's meeting at the White House, he said it was a good exchange. Everyone voiced their considered opinion about the war in Iraq, end quote. What's most troubling about Senator Reid's comments yesterday is his defeatism. Indeed, last week he said the war is already lost. And the timetable legislation that he is now pursuing would guarantee defeat. Maybe it's a political calculation. Some Democratic leaders seem to believe that blind opposition to the new strategy in Iraq is good politics. Senator Reid himself has said that the war in Iraq will bring his party more seats in the next election. It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage. Leaders should make decisions based on the security interest of our country, not on the interest of their political party. Thank you.

Good. Stick it to them, Mr Vice President, they richly deserve it.

Too silly to answer, but...

FOXNews.com:

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday phoned President Bush to air her complaints over Vice President Dick Cheney's comments that the Congressional Democrats' plan for Iraq would "validate the Al Qaeda strategy." [well, it does.]

Pelosi, who said she could not reach the president, said Cheney's comments wrongly questioned critics' patriotism [As usual, he never mentioned patriotism. But if the shoe fits...] and ignored Bush's call for openness on Iraq strategy. [he's just being open.]

"You cannot say as the president of the United States, 'I welcome disagreement in a time of war,' and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country," the speaker said. [why the hell not?]

The quarrel began in Tokyo, where Cheney used an interview to criticize Pelosi and Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., over their plan to place restrictions on Bush's request for an additional $93 billion for the Iraq war to make it difficult or impossible to send 21,500 extra troops to Iraq. [And that plan is different from what al Qaeda wanted....how? Any of you chomskies want to fill me in?]

"I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the Al Qaeda strategy," the vice president told ABC News. "The Al Qaeda strategy is to break the will of the American people ... try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit." [that's what al Qaeda wants. That's what the Dems want. They are allies. Naughty naughty Dick Cheney, telling the truth so bluntly..]

Sick...

This guy is sick. And I bet there will be no rush by his fellow chomskyoids to criticize him...

I give thanks O Lord for Dick Cheney's Heart, that brave organ which has done its darn-tootin' best on four separate occasions to do what we can only dream about.

O Lord, give Dick Cheney's Heart, Our Sacred Secret Weapon, the strength to try one more time! For greater love hath no heart than that it lay down its life to rid the planet of its Number One Human Tumor...(Link thanks to Dr Helen)

The Vice President is a great American and a great public servant, and is worth 10,000 of the nihilist ankle-biters who hate him so much! Long may he live.

Troops at Al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar gather around
Vice President Dick Cheney for pictures and handshakes March 17, 2002.
White House photo by David Bohrer

Puffick Storm...

The End of the World As We Know It? (Jane Smiley, October 28, 2006, HuffingtonPost.com)

You gotta check it out, this piece ties the leftist package up perfectly. The world is about to end due to Global Warming, and the Iraq Campaign was only about Dick Cheney stealing Iraq's oil, which is contributing to Global Warming. It all fits!

The thoughts one can think here are many, but what grabs me is that Climate Change is the perfect excuse! A Perfect Storm of excuses for feeling superior while ignoring the actual problems and sufferings in the world today. Well, "ignoring" is too weak a word. Assuming a position of God-like superiority is more like it.

Ten-thousand-a-week slaughtered in Darfur? Don't bother me with trivialities, man, can't you see I'm Visualizing-Lower-Carbon-Emissions? And anyway it's all just an excuse to steal more oil. And if those little people live, they will just burden the planet, and die anyway when the oceans rise.

Most important of all, it's an excuse to not adjust to change. To keep one's world-view firmly anchored in 1973. That's hard to do, even with the help of NPR and the NYT, since the predictions assumed to be true back when the Baby-Boomers were young have all failed. And the predictions that conservatives were making back then have mostly come true. (I won't list them; I've been blogging these things for almost 5 years now)

But no matter, Global Warming trumps everything! If billions are going to die soon, how silly it is to try to save millions now. If free enterprise and Globalization are lifting billions of people out of poverty (and statism has utterly failed to do the same) who cares? Those tiresome brown-skinned people would be better off poor. And happier of course. And more picturesque, for when us sensitive Western Liberals take a jumbo jet to their picturesque squalid countries for picturesque low-emissions adventure treks (wearing the latest in picturesque adventure garments) so we can feel spiritually superior to pudgy people on cruise ships or casinos...

And the very cream of the jest is that Global Warming trumps Global Warming! One even gets to be superior to the messy nitty-gritty political and engineering maneuvers and compromises needed to actually reduce carbon emissions. That the US is doing better at reducing carbon than Kyoto-pompous Canada is not important. It's the symbolism that counts, not nasty reality. That the best practical solution to carbon emissions is to invest massively in nuclear power is beneath notice—Only utopian solutions need apply. Ones that involve white middle-class Western leftists being put in charge of everybody else, and, much more important, being allowed to keep their world-picture intact...

(Thanks to Orrin Judd, whose comment is also good: "What's especially quaint about the anti-human Left is that they appear not to grasp that their belief that human engineering will cause some kind of catastrophic global warming is identical to their belief that they could human engineer a Marxist utopia.")

Top 11...

The Nihilist in Golf Pants gives us:

Top 11 Reasons for the 24 Hour Delay in Reporting Dick Cheney’s Hunting Accident

11. It took a while for The Wolf to arrange the cleanup

10. Thought Federal law mandating 24 hour cool down period for firearms was for AFTER they were fired.

9. Didn’t want to be distracted by a lot of questions until after the Men’s 20km biathalon

8. Cheney wanted to make sure he hadn't taken Whittington out of season.

7. Didn’t want the press to immediately declare the hunting trip a quagmire

6. Mistakenly thought that the Nihilist in Golf Pants wouldn’t be able to come up with a top 11 list on a Sunday

5. Wanted to arrange a couple more hunting trips before the word got out

4. Had a tough time tying Whittington to the hood to bring him into town

3. Ted Kennedy always saying that you should wait 24 hours before reporting an accident

2. Had to debrief the Halliburton board first

1. Needed time to falsify intelligence showing that Whittington had WMDs

Maybe he was just psyching himslf up for the duel with Lawrence O'Donnell. Principals will each drink three bottles of Dos Equis, then fire birdshot from 28-gauge guns at 30 paces...

silly flap...

PowerLine posts a note from an experienced hunter. I've done a little shooting myself (dove and rabbits, more decades ago than I want to admit) and it sounds about right.

I can't believe the way our "press" is disgracing itself. Take a bunch of Blue-State girlie-men, add a massive case of BDS, and we get hissy-fits so ludicrous I'm embarrassed to live in the same country with them.

I'll be happy to go hunting with Dick Cheney, if he wants to invite me...

Update: I e-mailed Karl about this, and he said it was all just a stunt. (Don't tell anyone.) Apparently the 391 hunters in the country who still vote Democrat are a torment to his perfectionist soul. Reason has failed with them, so he told Dick to do something outrageous. (The VP rejected, as dishonorable, the suggestion that he pepper a reporter.)

aggregated snark...

Here's a little more detail on Dick Cheney's visit to Iraq. (Thanks to Glenn.) But what's odd to me is that this is a story by the Canadian Press, aggregated by something called Newstex, and now aggregated again by Pajamas Media. I'm supposedly signed up as part of PJ Media, but I'm darned if I can figure out the point of this...

Now I have an idea. PJ Media should take various much-discussed articles and display them with multiple layers of Fisking!. Click once and you see the article displayed interlinear comments by one or two top bloggers. Click again to see the piece larded with additional comments by others. Click again and the comments themselves will be interlaced with anti-comments and refutations... Perhaps the comments should be color-coded, with, say, conservatives in red text, liberals in blue, libertarians in white...

I didn't learn much from the piece, but here's a good example of snark:

...Cheney flew around the Baghdad area in a pack of eight fast-moving Blackhawk helicopters with guns mounted on the sides. He flew along the airport road that has been the site of many insurgent attacks and passed over the courthouse where Saddam's Hussein's trial is being held.

He saw rows of housing for soldiers at Camp Victory fortified by concrete walls. Smoke from the trash fires burning throughout the occupied city drifted up toward his chopper....

"Throwing their own words back at them"

..... What we're hearing now is some politicians contradicting their own statements and making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war. The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out. American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures – conducting raids, training Iraqi forces, countering attacks, seizing weapons, and capturing killers – and back home a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie.

The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone – but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history. We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them. And far more important, we're going to continue sending a consistent message to the men and women who are fighting the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other fronts. We can never say enough how much we appreciate them, and how proud they make us. They and their families can be certain: That this cause is right … and the performance of our military has been brave and honorable … and this nation will stand behind our fighting forces with pride and without wavering until the day of victory."

-- Vice President Cheney

From remarks at the Frontiers of Freedom Institute 2005 Ronald Reagan Gala

"Weidner's Law"

I've become fascinated by the way the "Bush lied about WMD's" argument is being hear more and more. You would expect "less and less," since the thing is done, and sensible people should be dealing with where we are now.

But dealing with "where we are now" is just what America-hating lefties can't touch. It's becoming ever clearer that where we are now is in the midst of a success of world-changing scope. In fact, perhaps it should be a general principal. Call it "Weidner's Law:" Anybody still harping on "Bush lied about WMD's" is tacitly admitting that the Iraq Campaign has been a huge success.

This is from a frenzied anti-Bolton column in the WaPo by Richard Cohen, comparing Bolton with Dick Cheney:

...But taking the nation to war for false reasons is not a minor blip. It is an unpardonable feat of hubris for which, on a daily basis, Americans die in Iraq. American voters, though, have been oddly forgiving (see the last election), and the Bush administration has neither apologized nor fired anyone for getting things so very, very wrong. The conclusion is inescapable: This was not a war for the wrong reason; this was a war for any reason...(Thanks to Bill Quick)

Well, gee, maybe Americans are "oddly forgiving" because they are now seeing just how very very right Bush was. Or even that (a point fatuous liberal brains probably can't even process) when your country is attacked, then you need to fight. And we need leaders who are willing to fight. And that it's better to fight a poorly chosen battle than none at all.

Myself, I think it flatters Bolton to compare him with Cheney. And if he's even one tenth the man Dick Cheney is, and if his efforts are even one tenth as successful as the Iraq Campaign has been, then Bolton will be in the books as one of the best of his time...

a cook on the Union Pacific Railroad...

From Vice-President Dick Cheney's speech, a bit I liked

...On this night, as we celebrate the opportunities that America offers, I am filled with gratitude to a nation that has been good to me, and I remember the people who set me on my way in life. My grandfather noted that the day I was born was also the birthday of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so he told my parents they should send President Roosevelt an announcement of my birth. Now my grandfather didn't have a chance to go to high school. For many years he worked as a cook on the Union Pacific Railroad, and he and my grandmother lived in a railroad car. But the modesty of his circumstances didn't stop him from thinking that President Roosevelt should know about my arrival. My grandfather believed deeply in the promise of America, and had the highest hopes for his family. And I don't think it would surprise him much that a grandchild of his stands before you tonight as Vice President of the United States....

"It's hot, it's sexy and it's out of print..."

The Fruitloops like to say that President Bush is just a puppet manipulated by Dick Cheney. Yeah, sure, that's right. But what they don't know is the the Vice President is himself a puppet, with strings pulled by the redoubtable Lynne Cheney! Just kidding, but she's quite a woman, as everyone on the Rive Droit knows. This bit is from a town hall meeting where she and her husband are answering questions.

...MRS. CHENEY: No, I think your analysis is exactly right. The argument I would pose to those people, though, who are threatened by the idea of change -- the question I would pose is, should any child be forced to stay in a failing school? And the answer is no. No child should have to stay in a failing school.

[you have to read on to get to the sexy part]

And one of the things that No Child Left Behind does is if a school doesn't improve, the school can't improve, then kids have an opportunity -- parents have an opportunity to send their children to a higher achieving public school.

Dick and I supported private choice for a long time. Because we haven't been able to make public policy out of it, a number of people support programs that do provide kids who don't have a lot of resources the opportunity to attend a private school. I also -- just one other idea, the people you talk to who are opposing the idea of choice, I would suggest this scenario, really, that it doesn't threaten the public schools when a child leaves to go to another school, it provides that school an impetus to improve, a reason to improve. What we know about life is that businesses get better when there's competition. We know about life that all sorts of projects get better if there's some competition -- and that when there's only the status quo, there's not that little engine of improvement. So I would argue that choice really gives our public schools the kind of motive to improve that's really valuable. So it's a terrific idea. The President has gone some way forward in No Child Left Behind by making public school choice possible...

that little engine of improvement. Good line. And I was just Googling a bit, and found out that Lynne Cheney wrote a hot and feminist novel published in 1981:

But then there's another book, written by another well-known political figure, and it's a doozy. Throughout its pages are fornication (the heroine with her late sister's husband), incest (half-brother knocks up half-sister), adultery (the heroine, with her first husband's friend), contraception (by the wed and the unwed) and lesbian couplings (the heroine's sister and an older woman). And incidentally, lynchings, dogicide, cattle theft and robber-baronism.

The book was published 23 years ago, before the author's husband became one of the nation's most influential politicians, and before the author became a Valkyrie in the culture wars. And the author is ... aha, you thought I was going to say Hillary Clinton, didn't you?

It's Lynne Cheney, wife of the Republican vice president. The book is a frontier novel of the 19th century called "Sisters." It's hot, it's sexy and it's out of print.

I could find only 11 copies in all of the nation's public libraries, mostly in red states: four in Wyoming, Cheney's home state, and one each in North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Kansas, Virginia and Kern County, Calif.

On the Internet, the original 1981 $2.50 Signet paperback has an asking price of $2,999.95 to $25,000, the latter more than the cost of a first edition of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."...[link]

The writer I'm quoting thinks it's a big laugh that a Republican woman should have written such a book--a skeleton in her closet he seems to think it. Actually it's the lefty clichés that are a joke; feminism was originally about women being strong independent achievers, which is Lynne (and her daughters) then and now. The embarrassment is how leftists have changed the meaning of the word to mean "stuffed-shirt women's auxiliary of the Democrat Party."

Actually, far from being considered an embarrassment, Cheney's novel has a page at Whitehouse.org. I wonder if they are hoping the Dems will attack her for it? That would be funny. Apparently one side-effect of the despicable and dishonest attacks on President Bush's Air Guard service is that a lot of people found out that he had been a fighter pilot, and liked him all the better...
Update: I GOOFED! Arkadiy Belousov notes in a comment that Whitehouse.org is a parody site. Stupid of me, Whitehouse.gov is the White House site. Thanks for the tip, Akadiy.

As sobering as can be...

Radio host (and blogger) Hugh Hewitt has an interview with Vice President Cheney. It's worth reading. I also liked the points Hugh hits in this summing up:

The Vice President is blunt, and some of the answers, especially as to the possibility of al Qaeda having access to nukes, are as sobering as can be.  Note that he doesn't hesitate to call a shrine sensitive, but also mocks the idea that a war can be. This strikes me as exactly the right answer: tactics can be measured --the withdrawal from Fallujah in the spring, the care with which the Imam Ali Shrine is handled-- but the overall war cannot be made smooth. It is a terrible thing, and takes a terrible toll.  There's no getting around it in the world in which most of us live, though Kerry seems to dream of a far off place where the UN, led by the French and the Germans, can help us conduct a war without any hard spots or terrible losses.  Kerry's many ambiguities and his promises of greater sensitivity work well on The West Wing, perhaps, but not in a real war with real terrorists looking for real nukes and other deadly WMD.

The Veep was easy on the Christmas-in-Cambodia back-flip, as I expected he would be.  But not on the central issue of the campaign: fitness to be the commander-in-chief in a war. And I especially liked his assessment of the spread of Moore's Disease throughout the Democratic Party: It reflects a fundamental weakness of the leadership there that Moore cannot be quarantined and denounced as a marginal nutcase. 

John Edwards must be preparing to shine in his big debate date with the VP as we speak.  Edwards will certainly be better spoken --note all the "wells" throughout the transcript, and I left out many "ahs" here and there for transcribing ease-- and thus Edwards is a prohibitive favorite to "win" the debate, if Americans are looking for smooth-talk.  If they are looking for leaders to wage and win war, well then, it might turn out differently.

More unintended consequences...

Update to previous post: I found this article on the Cheney family snarky but interesting. It's very telling; the NewsWeekies obviously don't care for the Cheney's, but can't find anything solidly bad to say to say about them. (Just as they write puff-pieces about Edwards, but can't find anything solid to praise him for.) They have to admit there is no evidence of any wrongdoing vis a vis the Halliburton Corporation.

More unintended consequences, at least for me. Newsweek calls the Cheney family stuff like: intense, prickly, insular, dangerous to cross.... Hey, I think I like these people! I'd like to get to know them better!

'The Family,' left to right: Lynne,
Dick, Mary and Liz
photo: David Hume Kennerly

[Thanks for the link to Betsy Newmark, who notes: One of the authors is Evan Thomas, who said openly last week that the media wanted Kerry to win and would publish glowing reports about Edwards and Kerry. To back that up, Newsweek had a sickening kissup piece about how wonderful John Edwards is last week. I guess this article on Dick Cheney is their effort at balance: praise Edwards, bash Cheney. ]

The mystical moment when change began...

It's a funny thing, the unintended consequences of things we do. For example, the postmodernist crowd has been harping on how dreadful Vice-President Cheney is. To listen to them, he's the second-coming of Grendel.

But the effect on me (and suspect many others) has been the opposite of what they hoped for. I've been inspired to find out more about him. And the more I find out, the more I like him, and the more impressed I am. (Thanks, guys!) He's been an important conservative figure since the Ford Administration, but I hardly knew it. The things I'm learning are not secrets, but not well-known either. Dick Cheney's the very model of a loyal team player, and so has never pushed himself into the limelight. He's never leaked his views to the press, or sought publicity.

So whaddya think, maybe the Cheney-haters are going to be the ones who save Cheney from undeserved obscurity! Ha ha.

I recommend this article, The Conservative Case for Cheney, by Stephen Moore & Jeffrey Bell:

...In virtually every one of this remarkable succession of roles, Cheney has been on the right flank of his milieu. As Ford's deputy chief of staff, he was listening to obscure supply-siders like USC professor Arthur Laffer and was one of a minority of Ford advisers who fruitlessly pushed tax-rate reduction. (When Laffer drew his famous curve on the dinner napkin, Cheney, along with chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld, was the audience.) In the House leadership of the 1980s, Cheney was the most relentless and best-informed advocate of the Reagan military buildup that helped win the Cold War. Under Bush I, he was the only member of the administration's top policy team who quietly disagreed with the decision to end the ground war after 100 hours and thus leave Saddam Hussein in power...

Leaving Saddam in power was a catastrophe. I'm utterly thrilled to learn that Cheney was opposed.

But it's the mention of Arthur Laffer that really makes my head spin. When great movements begin, it is a very human thing to embody those beginnings in a story, a myth. The dinner at the Washington Hotel restaurant, with Laffer drawing the Laffer Curve on a dinner napkin is one such. Not that it didn't happen, but somehow it has become "mythical," has become an oft-repeated tale (one that's rather variable and Rashomon-like), "the beginning," the mystical moment when change began. The first knights gathering at the Round Table.

I've read the story a number of times, yet Cheney wasn't in my memory as being present. Maybe he wasn't, perhaps he's been "painted in," like a knight who missed the Quest for the Grail, but is portrayed anyway. But probably I just forgot, because Dick Cheney seemed to me to be a minor figure, and Jude Wanniski and Rumsfeld are so colorful. But he wasn't a minor figure. He was there at the beginning, and he's still fighting the good fight.

The collectivists are correct to hate him. Not because their goofy conspiracy theories are true, but because Dick Cheney has worked openly (though not noisily) for decades as a leader in the battle to prevent their socialist kudzu from choking out all other life forms...

Sounds about right to me...

Jay Bryant thinks Dick Cheney may be the best VP in US history. Of course that's not a high bar to leap, traditionally the Veep doesn't do anything...

...Cheney is the only Vice President ever accused of being too influential. The paranoid caricatures paint him as a Svengali, manipulating President and nation in the interests of – what, Halliburton? I have observed Dick Cheney since his days in Congress; he is one of the most responsible and capable leaders I can think of. He was in government decades before he went to work for Halliburton and any suggestion that he would put that or any other private interest ahead of his country is a canard both absurd and malicious.

Dick Cheney has elevated the Vice Presidency to an unprecedented level of importance and influence. Because of this, his enemies have attacked him with unprecedented vituperation, his very competence grist for their mills of hatred....