True Believers: Abdulmullatab and Cheney
“Passionate hatred,” Eric Hoffer wrote half a century ago, “can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.”
Days after a 23-year-old Nigerian demonstrates the enduring truth of this observation by Eisenhower’s favorite philosopher, along comes 68-year-old Dick Cheney to confirm its universality.
The former Vice President emerges to deplore not the attempted bombing but Barack Obama’s response to it. Cheney, apparently at loose ends before his memoirs are published in May, can’t resist another airing of the fanatical grievance of his holy cause–to prove that Bush’s successor cares only about “social transformation” of American society.
“As I’ve watched the events of the last few days,” he says in a statement, “it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war…He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency–social transformation.”
It’s not clear whether Cheney pounced on Obama’s first cautious reaction to the incident or simply chose to ignore his subsequent condemnation of a “systemic failure” and order of a top-to-bottom review of security procedures.
But as Cheney and other rabid Republicans continue their attacks on the Administration, the rest of us may take comfort in another observation of the longshoreman-philosopher who wrote “The True Believer” and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan.
“It is cheering,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “to see that the rats are still around–the ship is not sinking.”
MORE.
13 Responses to “True Believers: Abdulmullatab and Cheney”
Robert: I like to play a little game once in a while, to clear my head. For those with whom I disagree the most, I am required to name one admirable thing about them. Here goes:
Bill Clinton — He has done much to counter the spread of AIDS in Africa.
There, that wasn't TOO hard. Now, it's your turn, Robert. Ready? Here's the person: Dick Cheney. What is your reply?
P.S. — If you can't find at least one thing to put there, then you're hopeless partisan.
Because we all know that directing criticism at Teh One is just the same as trying to blow up a commercial plane with 280 innocent civilians on board.
I'll give you one thing, redbus: He loves his gay daughter.
Now can you tell us the point of this exercise, and how it changes the fact that Dick Cheney's constant attacks on Pres. Obama for handling national security and foreign policy in a manner not to Cheney's liking are an obvious and utterly despicable attempt to rehabilitate his own irretrievably damaged reputation while assaulting the leadership skills of the man who is trying to undo or mitigate the inexpressible harm that Cheney's policies, actions, and decisions have done to this country's national security? Does naming one admirable thing about Dick Cheney change or outweigh the vileness and moral stench of this man for whom tearing down Pres. Obama in order to resurrect his own credibility is more important even than his country's national security?
Why can't Cheney display the reverential respect for the President that Al Gore displayed for Bush?
Let me know when Cheney starts screaming stuff like this into a microphone:
“He betrayed this country!” Mr. Gore shouted into the microphone at a rally of Tennessee Democrats here in a stuffy hotel ballroom. “He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place.” The speech had several hundred Democrats roaring their approval for Mr. Gore, the party's 2000 standard-bearer.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0209-01…
“how it changes the fact that Dick Cheney's constant attacks on Pres. Obama for handling national security and foreign policy”
You're right, Kat. It doesn't. I think Cheney is a tool. He has made many valid points – he's not “all evil” as Robert would have us believe. And neither is Obama.
It is not President Obama's fault that the bomber nearly succeeded in his attempt to kill Americans, no more that any other President. Our security had holes in it long before Obama, Bush, and Clinton. We knew that our nation was a target and refused to act out of arrogance and the “it'll never happen here” mentality. That's a failure that goes well beyond partisan politics.
The problem I had with Robert's Cheney-bashing rant, is that he villifies Cheney for criticising the President. Yet he leaves Obama alone, when he villifies Bush in nearly every speech. Both are wrong.
Gee, Stein, you don't sound very moderate to me.
I suppose you'd rather have Cheney and other “rabid Republicans” just shut up and stop criticizing Obama? Absent criticism, how to you think the Obama administration would behave?
Regardless of your extreme disgust toward Cheney, his criticism can help balance out Obama's leftism, especially by countering Obama's tendency to deemphasize the government's most important goal: ensuring the safety of all Americans.
The point of the exercise is to remember that if my greatest hero is not perfect, then neither is my worst enemy without redeeming qualities. Robert Stein's post lacked any nuance, yet nuance is exactly what sets TMV apart from other blogs. It's what keeps me coming back. I can get partisan schlock at a thousand other sites. I expect more here.
Well, redbus, whatever “nuance” there may be in Dick Cheney's private life, there is none in his public life. That “there is good and bad in everyone” is obviously true — so obviously true that it's a truism, which means in part that it adds nothing new or valuable to the discussion. Indeed, when discussing villainy on the Cheneyesque level, a truism like “But there's good and bad in everyone! Let's think of one good thing about Dick Cheney” actually has a dismissive undertone.
And btw, the concepts of “my greatest hero” and “my worst enemy” are not analogous to a specific public figure like Dick Cheney whom none of us know personally but who has objectively done great harm to our polity and our democracy. “My greatest hero” and “my worst enemy” are relative concepts having as much to do with something very specific and personal to your own life as with any neutral standards. They don't even have to be people who are known to anyone else but you. If I say that my greatest hero is my father, or that my worst enemy is a friend who betrayed me after I had been there for her at the worst moment in her life, it can be useful in such instances to remember that my father wasn't perfect, or that my former friend is “not without redeeming qualities.” Such exercises are very different from demanding that we find “something good” about a man who has done as much harm in his public life as Dick Cheney has.
So I'm sorry, but we'll have to add this one to the list of things on which we disagree.
OK, let's imagine Cheney's response to a 1000% response to the bomber. Obama says, “we're engaged in a complete analysis of how CIA, FBI, TSA and DHS gathers intelligence, how it has been communicated, what action steps are recommended and taken, and what the cost and effect of those actions was. The review will look at every step of decision making up to and including the decisions of Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld, as well as Obama, Biden and Napolitano.”
Would that satisfy you, Dick? Bet it would not. I wish Obama would take exactly that stance. Careful what you wish for. Apparently, what Cheney wanted, was for Obama to do what Bush did not; cancel his vacation, rush back to the White House and make a somber and stern warning statement about how “they hate our freedoms” and “we're gonna smoke em out” and “fight them there so we don't have to fight them here” and “bring em on.”
Yeah, that would be SO much more effective.
Dick Cheney has long held a spot on my list of People I Wish Would Just Shut Up. His comments on Obama were unfair and inaccurate.
The problem with this essay though is it's attempt to analogize a guy who is just speaking his mind to a guy who tried to murder almost 300 people. Stein's sense of proportion is so out of whack it tends to invalidate the rest of his post, despite his making some reasonable points.
In your reply to Redbus, you display your old tactic: black is white and white is black (using a lot of words).
This is interesting, Kathy, because yesterday I had a conversation with a group of people who were unanimous that Cheney has spoken up far too much for a former Vice President. In comparison, Bush 43 is practically off the radar screen. I don't think we “disagree” on Cheney. Some of the things he has said have irked me, too. My point with Stein was his total dismissiveness of a man who has worked in several administrations, often away from the public eye. I'm willing to suspend judgment on those parts of his job that you and I will likely know little about, and thus have no way to evaluate.
Actually, redbus, many people (writers, past administration officials, media pundits, bloggers) have noted how much Cheney changed after 9/11. LOTS has been written and said about this. The one that jumps immediately to mind (why that particular one I don't know, but it does) is Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell in the Bush administration. He has worked with Cheney for years and knows him well, and he has said that he does not recognize this man, that he hasn't just changed, but seems to have become a totally different person after 9/11, and not in a good way. Many people have said the same. In Bart Gellman's political biography of Cheney — “Angler” — he also interviewed people who said the same thing. It's like he had some kind of permanent nervous breakdown after 9/11 and turned into this uber-paranoid, terrorist-obsessed nut. He was not like that before. Obviously, he was deeply conservative. But he was not crazy, obsessed, paranoid, out to bring down anyone who does not share his perceptions and his prescriptions about terrorism 100 percent.