(2004-09-08) Cheney Failures

T D Allman on Dick Cheney's history of failures. Having used Knowles as a steppingstone to Steiger, Cheney used Steiger as a steppingstone to a Nixon appointee named Donald Rumsfeld, then head of the Office of Economic Opportunity... Bruce Bradley recognized that Richard Nixon had violated fundamental American values; Cheney saw Water Gate as a power struggle. They even debated each other, in a forum arranged for Bradley's clients. "He claimed it was just a political ploy by the president's enemies," says Bradley. "Cheney saw politics as a game (Game Playing) where you never stop pushing. He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls. If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back.".. As the 1976 election approached, Rumsfeld and Cheney used the immense powers they had arrogated to themselves to persuade Gerald Ford to scuttle the Salt I I treaty on nuclear-arms control. The move helped Ford turn back Ronald Reagan's challenge for the party's nomination - but at the cost of ceding the heart of the GOP to the New Right. Then, in the presidential election, Jimmy Carter defeated Ford by 2 million votes... Cheney's strategy for gaining power was the same one he and Rumsfeld had foisted on Ford: making sure no one in the Republican Party outflanked him to the right. This was a deeply divisive approach, because it involved pandering to racial and religious extremists and using complex matters of national security as flag-waving wedge issues. "Dick's votes against civil rights and the environment were parts of complex deals aimed at enhancing his own power," says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter... By the end of the first George H W Bush administration, others had come to the conclusion that Cheney and his followers were dangerous. "They were referred to collectively as the crazies," recalls RayMc Govern, a CIA professional who interpreted intelligence for presidents going back to Kennedy. Around the same time, Mc Govern remembers, Secretary Of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft counseled the elder President Bush, "Keep these guys at arm's length."... As vice president, Cheney has been the decisive force pushing America into War On Iraq. In the inner councils of the administration, it was he who emasculated Colin Powell, cut the State Department out of effective policymaking, foisted fake reports on the intelligence agencies and supplanted the National Security Council. (another cross of Barlow and Cheney is at [z2003-02-26-BarlowOnIraq])