Saturday, March 9, 2013

The World According To Dick Cheney, or, Dick Cheney and the Banality of Evil

Dick Cheney, America's greatest living unindicted war criminal, is the subject of a new documentary that debuts March 15th on Showtime

Apparently Maureen Dowd has seen it (via Barry Ritholtz) and notes Dick can't help but admit he was giving the orders in the aftermath of 9/11.
Vanity Fair has a decent review of the film. 
You can imagine Cheney as the snake in the Oval Office tempting George W. Bush into one sin after another with similar feats of rhetorical slight-of-hand and psychological cunning: You don't want be like your father, do you? Getting your panties in a twist over what some Harvard professor is going to say about the [making air quotes] "Geneva Conventions?"
I've long felt that George W. Bush is sort of a tragic figure. Arrogant, incurious, a deeply flawed man. But the truly evil figure, the puppeteer who used Bush's hubris to advance his own ends, has always been Cheney (with an assist from Karl Rove).
And you know what? We're just going to keep getting Dick Cheney's. Our failure to prosecute Nixon or to stop the Gerald Ford pardon travesty opened a Pandora's box of debauched executive branch behavior, through Iran-Contra, Iraq and right up to today. Our failure to hold our leaders to account makes a mockery of the rule of law.




 

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