Maureen Dowd ( N.Y.Times ) has always been one of my
favorite columnists ~ mainly because of her sparkling
wit and political insight.
She has hit a homerun with yesterday's column about
Mr Cheney's influence on incurious George.
Allen L Roland
It's a classic story line in myth, literature and
movies: a man coming into his own is torn between
two older authority figures with competing world
views; a good daddy and a bad daddy; one light
and benevolent, one dark and vengeful.
When Bush the Elder put Bush the Younger in the
care of Dick Cheney, he assumed that Mr. Cheney,
who had been his defense secretary in Desert
Storm, would play the wise, selfless counselor.
Poppy thought his old friend Dick would make a
great vice president, tutoring a young president
green on foreign policy and safeguarding the
first Bush administration's legacy of
internationalism, coalition-building and
realpolitik.
Instead, Good Daddy has had to watch in alarm as
Bad Daddy usurped his son's presidency,
heightened its conservatism and rushed America
into war on the mistaken assumption that if we
just acted like king of the world, everyone would
bow down or run away.
Bush I officials are nonplused by the apocalyptic
and rash Cheney of Bush II, a man who pushed
pre-emption and peered over the shoulders of
C.I.A. analysts, as compared with the skeptical
and cautious Cheney of Bush I (who did not even
press to march to Baghdad in the first gulf war,
when Saddam Hussein actually possessed chemical
weapons).
Some veterans of Bush I are so puzzled that they
even look for a biological explanation, wondering
if his two-year-old defibrillator might have made
him more Hobbesian. Mr. Cheney spent so much time
in his bunker reading gloomy books about
smallpox, plague, fear and war as the natural
state of mankind.
Last week, for the first time, W. -- who tried to
pattern his presidency as the mirror opposite of
his real father's -- curbed his surrogate
father's hard-line crony Rummy (Mr. Cheney's
mentor in the Ford years).
The incurious George, who has said he prefers to
get his information from his inner circle rather
than newspapers or TV, may finally be waking up
to the downside of such self-censorship. You can
end up hearing a lot of bogus, self-serving
garbage from Ahmad Chalabi, via Mr. Cheney and
Paul Wolfowitz, instead of unpleasant reality.
I hope Mr. Bush at least read the news coverage
of his vice president's Iraq speech on Friday,
which was a masterpiece of demagogy.
On a day when many Republicans were finding a
lesson of moderation in Arnold Schwarzenegger's
victory in California, Mr. Cheney once more chose
a right-wing setting, the Heritage Foundation, to
regurgitate his rigid ideology. While Arnold was
saying to voters, "You know best," Mr. Cheney was
still propounding "Father Knows Best."
Even after the president was forced to admit
after Mr. Cheney's last appearance on "Meet the
Press" last month that the link the vice
president drew between Saddam and 9/11 did not
actually exist, that did not deter Mr. Cheney. He
repeatedly tied Saddam and 9/11 and said, all
evidence to the contrary, that the secular Iraqi
leader "had an established relationship with Al
Qaeda."
He characterized critics as naïve and dangerous
when his own arguments were reductive and
disingenuous. In justifying the war, he created a
false choice between attacking Iraq and doing
nothing.
The war in Iraq and its aftermath have proved
that Mr. Cheney was wrong to think that a show of
brute strength would deter our enemies from
attacking us. There are improvements in Iraq, but
it is still a morass, with 326 soldiers dead as
of Friday. It's hard to create security when we
are the cause of the insecurity.
Mr. Cheney lumped terrorists and tyrants into one
interchangeable mass, saying that Mr. Bush could
not tolerate a dictator who had access to weapons
of mass destruction, was allied with terrorists
and was a threat to his neighbors. Sounds a lot
like the military dictator of Pakistan, not to
mention the governments of China and North Korea.
To back up his claim that Saddam was an immediate
threat, the vice president had to distort the
findings of David Kay, the administration's own
weapons hunter, and continue to overdramatize the
danger of Saddam. "Saddam built, possessed and
used weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Cheney
said. Yes, but during the first Bush
administration.
Perhaps the president now realizes the Cheney
filter is dysfunctional. If Mr. Bush still needs
a daddy to tell him what to do, he should call
his own.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
Website: www.allenroland.com
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I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.
If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight.
The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns
6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas
to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and
the soldiers follow the flag.
Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (1933)
1:14:18 PM 
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