Scott Horton wrote quite an interesting column for Harper’s Magazine about US vice president Dick Cheney. Cheney has been under fire for a while now; especially since the Washington Post started publishing a series on him / his vice presidency (of which the last installment was published yesterday). Scott, too, isn’t exactly a fan of Cheney either:
Aristotle, writing in his Politics, spends a good bit of papyrus on the question of tyranny. What exactly makes a leader a tyrant, he asks. And right at the core of that discussion, he comes to the role of secrets. In a state which has degenerated into tyranny, he writes, the man who is vested with the public’s affairs craves secrecy in all things, whereas he demands that those in private life have no secrets from him – he unleashes his spies and he cultivates informants so that the normal citizen has no privacy in his life at all.
Now, Dick Cheney isn’t that bad, of course, but he certainly has quite some of the traits describes by Aristotle – he is not just the most powerful vice president to ever hold (that) office, he is also the most secretive one, or very close to being so: he can easily compete with Nixon et al. Secrecy truly seems to be an obsession for Cheney – almost a goal in itself.
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