It's sad to think that I spent the weeks from Labor Day to Election Day in 2000 aboard the Boeing 727 campaign plane of Dick Cheney, traveling America and watching him deliver speech after speech to an adoring Republican base.
Cheney generally kept his distance from his small accompanying press corps -- I was assigned to his campaign by my employer, USA TODAY -- but was accommodating enough on the couple of occasions when I needed and was granted one-on-one interviews with him, including on the eve of his successful televised debate with Democratic nominee Joe Lieberman. I had no reason to dislike Cheney. (And I had fun rebutting his frequent comments that Al Gore and Lieberman had "never met a payroll." I reminded Cheney at a rare news conference in Pennsylvania that Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln never met a payroll, either.)
Cheney had an awfully nice family, especially his charming 4-year-old granddaughter, Kate, on whom he and his wife Lynne doted. I was expecting nothing but positive contributions from him if the Republican ticket were elected.
Cheney's performance as vice president, once the Supreme Court awarded the election to the Bush-Cheney ticket, requires no further comment here. That is a matter of the past, although his power, policies and actions retain a resonance today. It is his performance since leaving office that disappoints me now.
Cheney has become a parody of the bitter, blindly partisan ex-officeholder. He takes sniper shots at the Obama administration at every opportunity (and at no opportunity), trumpeting the glories of waterboarding and Guantanamo Bay and playing a time-worn Republican card by portraying the Democrats as weak on terrorism, "pretending that we are not at war." This at a time when Obama, as Vice President Joe Biden pointed out last weekend on two TV talk shows, is continuing many Bush administration policies.
As others have pointed out, it's almost as if Cheney were praying for a massive terror attack on the United States, if only to discredit Obama -- and perhaps even to cause Americans to forget that 9/11 happened on the Bush-Cheney watch, after serious warnings of al-Qaeda intentions to mount airborne terror against the U.S.
If Biden's many accurate citations of Obama administration successes against terrorists -- stepping up use of drones and killing 12 of 20 al-Qaeda leaders, for one example -- were not enough to reveal Cheney's views for the balderdash they are, the news that the CIA and the Pakistanis have joined to capture at least two leading Afghan Taliban figures in the past week may finally keep Cheney silent for a while.
Whether or not we get any more valuable information out of the captured Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar or the Kunduz province "shadow governor" Mullah Abdul Salam, their removal from the battlefield is a major coup for antiterrorism efforts -- and, yes, for the Obama administration. It shows that American intelligence and diplomacy are very much on the job, keeping the pressure on -- just as Cheney patriotically should wish.
So let's cool it with the unconstructive criticism, Dick. But please say hello to Kate for me.
The New York Times: “The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials. The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials
Posted by: memory stick | March 12, 2010 at 07:30 PM