Daffy Does Doom
By MAUREEN DOWD,
Op-Ed Columnist NYTimes on the Web, January 27, 2007
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Maureen
Dowd. |
WASHINGTON -- Dick Durbin went
to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as
“delusional.”
It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.
Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional
doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of
the man.
Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and
misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s
right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions destroying
America’s reputation in the world, exhausting the U.S. military, failing to
catch Osama, enhancing Iran’s power in the Middle East and sending American kids
to train and arm Iraqi forces so they can work against American interests.
Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the guise of
exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.
You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of the way,
to remain in complete denial about Iraq’s civil war, to have a total
misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to the American
mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.
In a democracy, when you run a campaign that panders to homophobia by attacking
gay marriage and then your lesbian daughter writes a book about politics and
decides to have a baby with her partner, you cannot tell Wolf Blitzer he’s “out
of line” when he gingerly raises the hypocrisy of your position.
Mr. Cheney acts more like a member of the James gang than the Jefferson gang.
Asked by Wolf what would happen if the Senate passed a resolution critical of
The Surge, Scary Cheney rumbled, “It won’t stop us.”
Such an exercise in democracy, he noted, would be “detrimental from the
standpoint of the troops.”
Americans learned an important lesson from Vietnam about supporting the troops
even when they did not support the war. From media organizations to
Hollywood celebrities and lawmakers on both sides, everyone backs our troops.
It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably because they
worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway around the
world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture or the inevitable
insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of their fumbling management of
Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to criticizing the troops. Quel
demagoguery.
“Bottom line,” Vice told Wolf, “is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we
will continue to have enormous successes.” The biggest threat, he said, is
that Americans may not “have the stomach for the fight.”
He should stop casting aspersions on the American stomach. We’ve had the
stomach for more than 3,000 American deaths in a war sold as a cakewalk.
If W. were not so obsessed with being seen as tough, Mr. Cheney could not
influence him with such tripe.
They are perpetually guided by the wrong part of the body. They are
consumed by the fear of looking as if they don’t have guts, when they should be
compelled by the desire to look as if they have brains.
After offering Congress an olive branch in the State of the Union, the president
resumed mindless swaggering. Asked yesterday why he was ratcheting up
despite the resolutions, W. replied, “In that I’m the decision maker, I had to
come up with a way forward that precluded disaster.” (Or preordained it.)
The reality of Iraq, as The Times’s brilliant John Burns described it to Charlie
Rose this week, is that a messy endgame could be far worse than Vietnam, leading
to “a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we’re
seeing now,” and a “wider conflagration, with all kinds of implications for the
world’s flow of oil, for the state of Israel. What happens to King
Abdullah in Jordan if there’s complete chaos in the region?”
Mr. Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.
He assumes that the more people think he’s crazy, the saner he must be. In
Dr. No’s nutty world-view, anti-Americanism is a compliment. The proof
that America is right is that everyone thinks it isn’t.
He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone in the
wilderness must be a prophet.
To borrow one of his many dismissive words, it’s hogwash.
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