Power of the Pursed Lips
The day after President Bush appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes and Vice President Cheney appeared on FOX News, ash formulated an overview of their media campaign to convince the public of that which it had overwhelmingly rejected: the so-called surge of troops in Iraq. Rather than dispute figures and details, as she is loathe to do and is rarely the point, she discusses the matter from – what else – a psychological perspective:
As I write, literally millions of words have preceded mine assessing and scrutinizing the President’s speech. But few appraisers are content to conclude: he said what he had to, he did what he had to, to stave off his demons, the hell with the public’s immediate ridicule and instantaneous rejection.
“Those who would criticize my plan [for extracting our country from the Iraqi calamity] had better come up with their own,” he declared. Really? There are copious Democratic plans, an abundance of alternative plans, but that’s not the point. Neither is it that those who warned against war are in no way obligated – “responsible,” in Bush’s locution - to propose solutions to someone else’s clutter in order to point out that it is, in fact, a clutter not likely to be straightened by the President’s plan to clutter it further. The point is to keep it going – when there is no pullout, there is no defeat - assuring it will be unloaded into the next administration and Bush can repeat the mantra ‘til the end of his days, “I never lost a war. There is nothing to admit, when I never lost a war.”
While the President is about his majestic ego, the Vice President is about ideology. It’s seemingly selfless until you account for inserting himself into the premise.
Sponsored by FOX and endorsed by other propaganda media, that huffy little man makes his puffy pronouncements: “last throes,” “candy and flowers,” “liberation,” “we don’t conduct war by committee,” “the President already is granted permission to read your mail,” “if you will.” While it’s an amusing, if almost too effortless, parlor game to deconstruct every committee-produced sound bite on Cheney’s talking point list, to do so misses the point. Cheney doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that we’re on to him – since what can we do to him? - nor that the vast majority despises him. He hasn’t cared since his congressional career before he attained executive power. Now that he has it, he intends to fully right the excessive wrong visited upon Nixon of revoking his phony presidential privileges. It’s not that Nixon acted and Congress reacted, you see. It’s that Congress acted upon a Nixon divorced from his prior actions – rendering him not the perpetrator but the victim - and 30 years later Nixon’s victimhood is yet to be avenged as Cheney’s power restoration is nowhere near complete.
Willingly and knowingly, he gives away the game. What about that “we don’t conduct war by committee”? It may sound self-evident, but it’s patent nonsense. Substitute the word “committee” with “with input, from Congress, generals, civilian branches of government, and other officials,” and that is precisely how one must conduct war, if one is seriously interested in success. (Of course, if that war is really about micromanaging a faraway land’s resources without regard to its citizens’ welfare, one could argue he’s long since become victorious – with as little intrusion as possible.) And what about the allegedly articulated authority of the executive branch? Does Cheney care, before dispensing those certitudes, that innumerable scholars will cite numerous Amendments disabusing him of the notion that he already has what he thinks he can accomplish by pretending he already has it?
On some level, Cheney is a great deal more altruistic – noble, even, from his perspective – than Bush. While Bush is about Bush – the man, the family, the dynasty, the protection of reputation and psyche – Cheney is about wrenching control for others eventually to abuse. What would drive a man to deceive and exploit, to gut the principles of democracy to achieve a goal he hands to the next team as if it were a relay race? Without any assurances (and even if he were to devise the perfect formula for a Republican result in every future election) that the next administration, and the ones after it, would preserve the power he virtually produced single-handedly, why strive so mightily for the benefit of someone else, or no one?
The answer, I suppose, is his legacy, his stain on a once self-governing nation, along with his assumption that no President, ushered into previously established supremacy, would consider relinquishing it. If that’s not the reason, at least we now know the ultimate question.