UPDATE:
While only touched upon in the article below, Dick Cheney is not very charitable when it comes to some of his former colleagues in the Bush administration, such as George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice and Gen. Colin Powell.
When asked about that, and about Cheney’s statement that heads would be exploding in Washington, DC, in CBS’ Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer this weekend, Gen. Colin Powell first addresses the “exploding heads” remarks:
My head isn’t exploding and I haven’t noticed any other head is exploding in Washington, DC, and the explosive part of the book. And when Mister Cheney says its explosive but what I have read in the newspapers and seen on television, it’s essentially a rehash of the events of seven or eight years ago. What really sort of got my attention was this way in which he characterized it, it’s going to cause heads to explode. That’s quite a visual and in fact, the kind of headline I would expect to come out a gossip column, that’s the kind of headline you might see one of the super market tabloids write. It was not the kind of headline I would have expected to come from a former Vice President of the United States of America. Mister Cheney had a long and distinguished career and I opened his book that’s what he would focus on, not these cheap shots that he’s taking at me and other members of the administration who served to the best of our ability for President Bush.
Schieffer immediately focuses on the “cheap shots” part and asks: ”So you– you just label them flatly cheap shots?”
Here are parts of the General’s answer, where he also confirms—and apparently regrets—that he presented false information at the United Nations on the threat that Iraq allegedly posed to our nation.
Well yeah, they’re cheap shots. I mean, several one he– he tosses at me, you know, he takes a great credit for my resignation in 2004. Well, President Bush and I had always agreed that I would leave at the end of 2004. After the election, I stayed on three more months because I– I wanted to and because there were conferences that I wanted to attend and because Doctor Rice hadn’t been confirmed. So it’s no news there. He says that I went out of my way not to present my positions to the President but to take them outside of the administration. That’s nonsense. The President knows and I had told him what I thought about every issue of the day. Mister Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to President Bush if you break it, you own it. And you’ve got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we’ve to be prepared for the whole war not just the first phase. And Mister Cheney and many of his colleagues were not prepared for what happened after the fall of Baghdad. And I persuaded the President to take the case to the United Nations to see if we can be solved without war. And if it couldn’t be solved without war, we would have people aligned with us. Mister Cheney went out immediately after the President made that decision and undercut it by giving two speeches to veterans groups that essentially said he didn’t believe it would work. It’s not the way you support a President. And he also says that, you know that I was not supportive of the President’s position. Well, who went to the United Nations and regrettably with a lot of false information, it was me, it wasn’t Mister Cheney. I supported the President. I supported the President’s decisions. I gave the President my best advice…
Powell also addresses Cheney’s other cheap shots at Rice and Tenet:
Well he’s taken the same shots at Condi, with an almost condescending tone. She tearfully did this, or that. And he’s taken the same shots at George Tenet. And he has also, in some ways, indicated he didn’t always approve of what President Bush was deciding. And there’s nothing wrong with saying you disagree. But it’s not necessary to take these kind of barbs and then try to pump a book up by saying heads will be exploding. That’s even on the headline section of the Nixon Foundation to sell the book. I think it’s a bit too far. I think, Dick overshot the runway with that kind of comment, if that’s how he plans to sell his book. He’s had a long and distinguished life and career, and I hope that’s what the book focuses on, not these kinds of things.
Read the entire Face the Nation transcript here.
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In my “non-review” of Cheney’s latest attempt to justify the unjustifiable, his “In My Time,” I made it clear that I had not read the book, nor intended to read it. Cheney’s book promotion interview with NBC’s Jamie Gangel and reactions from those who had the stomach to read (parts of) it were enough for me.
One person who apparently had the courage —and the stomach—to read the book is the inimitable Maureen Dowd.
In her “Darth Vader Vents,” published in the New York Times this morning, Dowd tells it like no one else can.
Referring to Cheney’s scorched earth policy of “heedlessly bombing old colleagues,” after having lost the power to “heedlessly bomb the world,” Dowd attributes this trait to Cheney’s family relationship to Samuel Fletcher Cheney, a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea.
While I obliquely suggested that so many words in a 576-page book from a “one-word man” are probably attributable to Liz Cheney (a “contributor” to the book), Dowd is much more to the point:
His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.
Dowd describes how George W. Bush belatedly realized that Cheney was “a crank whose bad advice and disdainful rants against ‘the diplomatic path’ and ‘multilateral action’ had pretty much ruined his presidency” sometime after Cheney urged the bombing of Syria’s nuclear reactor when not a single hand went up in support of his suggestion at the Nation al Security Council
Dowd describes some of the other highlights of Cheney’s book that have already leaked out, like “torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions,” and Cheney’s “contempt for Tenet, Colin Powell and Rice, whom he disparages in a sexist way for crying, and condescension for W. when he won’t be guided to the path of most destruction.”
But Dowd also tells us about touching, little incidents such as W willing to stand up to “Vice,” making “a bold stand on not letting his little dog be gobbled up by Cheney’s big dog” and Cheney shooting “his Texas hunting partner in the face.” I don’t know if Cheney wrote about the latter incident in his memoir as it might go counter to his “flogging his cherished self-image as a rugged outdoorsman from Wyoming …and a vice president who was the only thing standing between America and its enemies.”
I do take exception to Maureen Dowd’s closing of her otherwise right-on-target piece.
Referring to Cheney’s account of the 2010 operation heart operation where he “recounts the prolonged, vivid dream about a beautiful place in Italy he had during the weeks he was unconscious,” she quotes from Cheney’s book:
“It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there…I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of newspapers.”
And she comments, “Caesar and his cappuccino.”
There is plenty to criticize this old man about without making light of his dreams while recovering from surgery. Dreams about an idyllic place in a foreign country which he probably will not be able to visit anyway because of certain legal issues.
Read more here.
