Cheney Reflects in his book "In My Time."

Dick Cheney is a singular public servant. He took the job as Veep after GWB appointed him head of a group to look for a likely candidate in the election campaign and then Bush 43 decided to choose Cheney, OVER CHENEY'S OWN OBJECTIONS. Of course, Dick Cheney could have made a Shermanesque, "If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve" statement, but his sense of public duty called him into what he calls "this business" even after six or so cardiac events, the first before he was forty years old. He expected, I suspect, to have another one in office. He deserves credit for accepting a task he may have thought fatal.

I didn't like Dick Cheney very much as his operational style did not exude much personal charm, and I would guess this might be because of his laconic Wyoming roots. My only memory of Wyoming is running out of gasoline there once and trying to hitch a ride to the nearest gas station, with more than an hour going by before one of the many cars picked me up to take me the twenty miles to get a jerrycan of gas. It is generally a harsh and very windy place, except for a few idyllic spots like Jackson Hole. Cheney is perhaps more of a "cowboy" than Yalie GWB ever was. Here's a representative set of paragraphs from Dan Henninger's excellent interview:

Foremost were the "wiretapping" controversies over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the administration expanded to monitor phone calls from foreign terrorists into the U.S. After its approval, the program required presidential reauthorization every 30 to 45 days. Mr. Cheney described for me the briefings on the program by CIA Director Michael Hayden to the congressional leadership. "The Big Nine, we called them," Mr. Cheney says. They included Nancy Pelosi, then a member of the House intelligence committee. No one, he says, objected to the program.

The FISA program worked until 2004. Then the administration's internal unity fell apart. White House aides who had gone to have the authorization renewal signed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in George Washington hospital, found the recently appointed deputy attorney general, James Comey, was already there.

Before the aides had left the White House, Mr. Cheney told me, "it's my understanding that Ashcroft said fine, send them over and he'd sign. Between the time of the phone call and the time when they got there, he'd done a 180 and Comey was in the room." Mr. Ashcroft refused to sign. Mr. Cheney relates in his book that Mr. Comey also convinced FBI Director Robert Mueller to withdraw support.

"There clearly was a development inside the Justice Department that led Comey and Mueller to express their disapproval (of the surveillance authority) after it had been approved 20 times," Mr. Cheney said. With resignations threatened, President Bush altered the program, despite assurances of its constitutionality.

Now that even a truthful public servant like Leon Panetta admitted after Bin Laden's death that waterboarding had provided key info after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began to sing like a birdie after several session, the FISA and other programs protecting the USA are seen in a new light. The April 2002 international conference on Israel and Palestine supported by Powell and his deputy Armitage was probably a bad idea, but in hindsight may have prevented the 2006 elections from allowing a Hamas takeover of Gaza. Then again, given the way the Second Law of Thermodynamics [entropy] works in the region, probably not. Too many cooks always ruin any grand buffet prepared under UN auspices.

On another subject, Cheney has a point in his disagreement with Rice & Christopher Hill about the North Korean wild goose chase, started by the insufferable ineffable do-gooder Jimmy Carter when he famously [though it's covered up in the liberal canonical narrative even to this day] made an "illegal" trip violating the Logan Act in 1994 to Pyongyang over Bill Clinton's strenuous objections. The effort by the failed peanut farmer was followed up by Madeleine Albright and the net result was that from one-to-two million North Koreans died of starvation while the US bribed the Norks with over a billion dollars to inspect a nuke facility which the invidious Norks used to build and continue their program, despite "promising" to stop their program. Net result: a stronger hold by the hopelessly fascist Communist regime over its enslaved populace. And to this day, political prisoners are flayed alive, people are starving to death in the outer provinces, and people like Condi Rice and Christopher Hill are trying to employ smoke, mirrors and mental opiates to achieve an illusion of some sort of "progress."

I saw Condi Rice on the latest 30Rock with classless asshole Alec Baldwin where AB's TV wife is kidnapped by the North Koreans and forced to marry Kim Jung-Il's retarded successor-son. She played some dynamite piano and the conceit that AB had broken up with her in a previous engagement by email was the high point of a tasteless, but funny vignette. I wonder if she reflected on her own fecklessness----of which North Korean hallucinations take place to the insistence by Condi that Hamas participate in January. '06 elections that resulted in a confrontation state in the insanely overcrowded Gaza Strip---a territory so hopeless that Egypt refused to take it back after the '67 War ended and Israel wanted it off its hands. Another thing you never read about---Condi's idealism is laudable, but it only gets her comic bits on 30Rock, not a substantive record for achievement.

The most interesting anecdote is about the Surge, where Cheney discovers that leaks about doubts concerning the Surge's viability are inveighed against by Dick, only to be told by NSC advisor Steve Hadley that POTUS GWB himself instructed Steve to make the leaks---Machiavellian maneuvering by the widely-read Bush, whose interest in history was sincere and far deeper than the understanding of the present occupant of the White House.



Powell's pettinss and Armitage's outright dishonesty and cowardice and ultimately, Armitage's loyalty, are all of a piece with the Armitage strategy of not revealing that he was the source of the Valerie Plame leaks, leading Scooter Libby to twist slowly in the wind while Prosecutor Fitzgerald, who already knew of Armitage's perfidy, went through a Kabuki charade and got Plame and Wilson on the cover of Vanity Fair, a dubious achievement and worthy of the Powell/Armitage gravitas quotient in foreign policy and inside-the-Beltway chicanery.

Powell is now imitating Winston Churchill in abandoning Barack Obama as he flails and flounders and even the lamestream MSM can't cover for the Manchurian Candidate or divert attention from the incompetent POTUS to John Boehner, as a serial dwarf named Mark Shields tried to do on his weekly over-the-hill agitprop session with the simpering slimeball David Brooks on the Friday evening follies on The Lehrer Report.

I find it a bit sad that David Petraeus has tarnished a brilliant career, far more impressive than the somewhat politicized ascent of Colin Powell to the highest levels of government, by accepting the CIA position, although Panetta has shown that one can retain his integrity [thought not the support of the treasonous lamestreamers and their lackeys] in that exalted stratosphere.

What is left unsaid in Cheney's general praise of his boss for political courage and, in the case of the Surge, absolute brilliant Texas-Hold-'Em pulling hot chestnuts out of a fire that a traitor playing the role of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in the midst of a wartime situation enunciated that "The war is lost" is somewhat counterbalanced by GWB's own machinations and too-clever-by-half chessboard moves, if I can dignify the authorized leaks against the Surge as such.

The sad problem in the rapidly deteriorating public "marketplace of ideas" lies in the constant mantras advanced by a completely discredited and repudiated "intelligentsia" which claims that any American elected offical who attempts to defend or advance our national interests is "stupid" such as Ronald Reagan was when he brought down the Soviet "Evil Empire," an apt description as I am in the middle of finally reading The Gulag Archipelago.

Cheney himself --- like his somewhat RINO boss GWB --- not only faced charges of lack of intelligence, but mendacity and venal moneymaking schemes through Halliburton's contracting activities in Iraq.

Now that we see the White House and Energy Dept actively implicated in the Solodyne panel dispute to the tune of $535 million, we shall see if the usual hypocrisy of the Demonrats comes forward with idiotic excuses. It has taken almost a year for Cong. Issa to pry open the Fast-and-Furious fiasco enough to reveal DOJ and Homeland Security stonewalling. Let's see if the WaPo and NYT display ANY signs of integrity on the real and persistent lack of cohesion and coherence in this administration, which is threatening to make Jimmy Carter's look "honest and sincere," if that can be taken as a compliment among the cynics living on the two Left Coasts, in comparison.

All in all, Dick Cheney has proven to be a better Veep than his incompetent predecessor, the ineffably venal and stupid and dishonest Al Gore as well as his ridiculous and outright silly successor, the Irish blathermonger and unending foot-in-the-mouth gaffer Joe Biden.

That's being damned by faint praise, but I'm going to finally buy the Cheney book, as well as David Mamet's sonderful "Secret Knowledge."

All this while reading Tony Judt's Postwar and his other great book Reappraisals while working through The Gulag Archipelago and Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers.

As for the Chambers bio, there is absolutely nothing new about a slanderous and even treasonous MSM in the USA. From the very first inkling of treason on the left, the MSM aligned with the enemies of the United States and gave aid and support to Hiss while slandering Chambers to a degree that shames the left to this day. The Left's insistent agenda to destroy any semblance of fair play or balanced judgment remains constant. The head of Harvard's Psychiatry Department announced that Chambers was victim of all sorts of delusional behavior, despite never having analyzed him in a conversation, as is required [Shades of 1000 shrinks calling Goldwater mentally ill, none of whom had ever talked to Barry face-to-face]. And the press actually made fun of the fact that Chambers' brother Dick had committed suicide, despite the fact that Hiss's father and sister both killed themselves [and another brother of Hiss died at thirty, a hopeless alcoholic]. To this day, the traitor Victor Navasky, or what's left of him, insists that Alger Hiss was not a spy and did not perjure himself, despite copious evidence from the now-unsealed East Bloc intelligence archives. The left's inability to advance its arguments by any means except subversion and dissembling double talk remain unchanged over the last one hundred years. Luckily, Chambers' friends at Columbia like Jacques Barzun [still alive at 105] & Mark Van Doren & others like Lionel Trilling, Louis Zukofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and other contemporaries did attest to Chambers' absolute brilliance, whenever he put his strange, shambolic, bizarre personality in order. Whittaker Chambers was a strange tormented man who wrote the best autobiography of the twentieth century. Alger Hiss went to his grave an unrepentent traitor. At least Bill Ayers admits his perfidy and now hints his authorship of Dreams of My Father. Gotta give Bill at least that benefit, the guy can write, though not as well as Chambers, and he's honest enough to admit his treason.

But as for Navasky and a horde of liars like Jonathan Alter and Eric Altermann, there are no minds more dishonest and more closed than those on the ideological left.