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Being Dick Cheney

By David Sirota

There are moments in the life of every politician when the public gets an unfiltered glimpse of the person behind the platitudes. For the first President Bush, it was cameras catching his wonderment at a supermarket scanner. For Mike Dukakis, it was his bobble head impression in the tank. And for Bill Clinton, it was his pained effort to define what “is” is.

But we are rarely treated to the morsels Vice President Dick Cheney recently served up. By the time he had finished a trio of public statements, Cheney confirmed our worst fear: He is divorced from reality.

First, Cheney held up Fox News Channel as the pinnacle of objective reporting. Despite the brazen sensationalism and hard-right tilt that have made Fox the laughingstock of American journalism, Cheney last month told thousands of Republican Party loyalists that he “ends up spending a lot of time watching Fox News, because they’re more accurate” than any other media outlet. Of course, just last year, a University of Maryland study found that Fox may well be the most inaccurate news organization in America. The study found, among other things, that 80 percent of people, like Cheney, who watched Fox held at least one major factual misperception about the war in Iraq—a far higher rate than viewers of any other network.

A few weeks later, Cheney cited Wal-Mart as “one of our nation’s best companies,” ignoring its poverty-level wages, mistreatment of workers and repeated violations of environmental law. He claimed the company “exemplifies some of the very best qualities in our country—hard work, the spirit of enterprise, fair dealing and integrity.” He failed to mention the 60 federal complaints against the company for workplace violations, Wal-Mart’s decisions to lock workers into stores and charges that it doctored hourly employees’ time records in order to skimp on wages. Instead, he parroted the Wal-Mart executives, the same ones who are bankrolling the Bush-Cheney campaign, and called for “litigation reform,” saying the problem afflicting America is pesky workers who have the nerve to challenge corporate malfeasance in court.

Finally, amidst increasing U.S. casualties and international uproar over prisoner abuse in Iraq, Cheney said, “Donald Rumsfeld is the best Secretary of Defense the United States has ever had.” The statement effectively endorsed Rumsfeld’s failure to plan for post-war Iraq and his dishonest statements about Iraq’s (still non-existent) WMD arsenal. It also undermined Bush administration apologies for Abu Ghraib by giving a public vote of confidence to the same defense secretary who supported the brutal interrogation tactics.

As shocking as these declarations are, they are really no surprise in the context of Cheney’s past public statements. For instance, early this year, Cheney cited a document previously discredited by the Bush Pentagon as the “best source” of information about a Saddam-al Qaeda link (none has ever been proved). And Cheney continues to trumpet his former oil company Halliburton as a beacon of corporate ethics, even as the company bilks taxpayers and mistreats U.S. troops in Iraq.

Yes, these out-of-touch comments evoke jokes about spending too much time in a secure undisclosed location. But they also illustrate something far more serious: the man who in one instant could be president has lost touch with reality. His judgment is so severely impaired that he relies on Fox for facts, Wal-Mart for economics, Halliburton for ethics and Don Rumsfeld for security. Cheney’s psychological profile has become suspiciously similar to your “crazy Uncle Ned”—a man you don’t want anywhere near your family. And yet, just one heartbeat separates Uncle Ned from all of our families.

Pundits will say that nothing Cheney says or does will affect the election. They will point to data proving Americans have never before made vice presidential nominees a deciding factor in their vote for president. (What else could explain Dan Quayle?) But with the security failures of 9/11 and the casualties mounting in Iraq, Americans have a renewed appreciation for steady hands and sound judgment in the White House. That means the paradigm could shift, and the vice presidential candidates could face unprecedented scrutiny. At that point, Cheney would become the real albatross around the Bush campaign’s neck, the perfect symbol of an out of touch and out of control administration that should be voted out of office.

David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times and a bestselling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," was released in May 2008. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations.

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  • Reader Comments

    When I expressed my incredulity to some of my Republican friends that they voted in 2000 for such an obviously uninformed nitwit as Bush, the most frequent answer I got back was that while they agreed that Bush wasn’t the brightest bulb, they were all sure that as things unfolded, Bush would be surrounded by grown-up, competent and experienced people like Cheney to guide him.  Well, as time has shown, so much for that theory. This whole administration is running in some alternate universe where up is down.

    Posted by sparrow on May 30, 2004 at 9:08 PM

    The danger behind the sneer has been publicized on the Internet from day one.  The PNAC connection, the energy meeting secrets, the war mongering lies of this man have been raising warning flags for a long time on alternative news sites.  Where was the complicit corporate media all this time?  Where is it now?  Duh....

    http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/cheney_s_secrets.html

    Posted by skipper7 on Jun 4, 2004 at 10:44 AM

    While I am stoutly anti Bush/Cheney. I must voice some displeasure at Mr. Sirota’s own inaccuracy of comments.  Specifically those dealing with Wal-Mart.  First, I do work at a store for this company, and am one of the lowly peons, not someone higher up.  While any corporation has its downsides, it does not pay poverty level wages.  In fact it pays us more than state minimum wages and gives raises every year without fail.  Not to mention profit sharing, assisted tax and fee-free stock purchase, very inexpensive and comprehensive health insurance among just of the few benefits given to the worker.  How many slave-driving fast food chain corporations can claim that?  As well, if there were any lock-ins (I remember being told about these and being shocked), they were by the store management themselves and not ordered by anyone higher up in the company.  I’m quite sure those people were dealt with swiftly as well, as in my store and district, strict compliance with state and federal labor law is enforced, concerning break and meal periods as well as a multitude of other issues.

    So while I disagree with the corporate decisions to support the Bush-Cheney campaign, that is their decision to make and mine to not support it.  And as I said, while every corporation has its downsides, Walmart does treat workers fairly and deals with management malfeasance in the positive by protecting the workers and always making sure there is someone to talk to without retaliation.  Mr. Sirota merely seems to be parroting some of the union anti-Walmart propaganda I have been reading of late, without many facts or resources to back them up.  An individual’s wrongdoing within a store is not an upper-level corporations wrongdoing unless it is encouraged to continue by order.

    Posted by clortho on Jun 5, 2004 at 4:59 PM

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Appeared in the June 21, 2004 Issue
Also by David Sirota
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