I’m not ready to completely discount the possibility that there were changes in Cheney’s personality over the 1993-2001 period. But a number of readers have suggested a more Occam’s Razor friendly explanation that I find pretty convincing. In all of Cheney’s earlier assignments, he held powerful positions under strong, at least fairly competent executives. Under Bush, especially during the first term, Cheney was, and certainly saw himself, pretty much in charge.
TPM Reader JB makes the point …
I’ve always been pretty dubious about the whole Cheney personality change theory, and not just because Bart Gellman doesn’t seem to give it much credence. I think it overlooks a much simpler explanation.
Dick Cheney acted as George W. Bush’s Vice President in ways he did not as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff or Defense Secretary under the elder George Bush because George W. Bush was not Ford and was not the elder Bush. I don’t really think the matter is any more complicated than that.
During the younger Bush’s first term especially, Cheney operated in ways that suggested he really didn’t think his nominal boss was really up to the job. He treated associates not directly useful to him with contempt and disregard for their roles in the government — something Ford would have discouraged and the elder Bush would have as well. George W. Bush barely noticed it, though he may understand it now.
Neither of the earlier Presidents Cheney served were giants. They were both career government men, sensitive about the prerogatives of their office and aware that their own success in public life was due to how well they worked within the rules, not how creatively they broke them. They also, in fairness to Cheney, did not experience anything like 9/11. Cheney earned his reputation for being smarter, shrewder and harder-working than most of the people he worked with in government. During the second Bush administration he had few checks on his authority, and after 9/11 especially felt an imperative to fill the vacuum left by his President’s limited interest in the details of government.
Cheney could not have been Cheney if Bush had not been Bush.
Norm Coleman still running one-man guerilla war to keep Dems from getting their 59th Senate seat.
A Republican operative gets a little too candid about how we know the folks at Gitmo needed to be tortured — and then gets an earful from Lawrence O’Donnell.
Must be nice for Obama to be able to dispatch Hillary to the Hill and have her mop the floor with the likes of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Watch.
She does a number on Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), too.
U.S. torture apologists could learn a thing or two from the Interior Ministry in the United Arab Emirates.
ABC News obtained a videotape smuggled out the UAE showing the crown prince’s brother torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods, and wooden planks with protruding nails before pouring salt in the man’s wounds and running over him with a Mercedes. A man in police uniform also appeared on the tape, aiding the sheik.
Confronted with the tape, the UAE had this peculiarly candid yet defiant response:
In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed.
“The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior,” the Interior Ministry’s statement declared.
The Minister of the Interior is also one of Sheikh Issa’s brother.
The government statement said its review found “all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department.”
This is the sort of response I’d expect if Monty Python were running a country’s internal security force: Yes, the sheik did it, but it was merely a one time thing, so no need to be alarmed — and our policeman followed all the rules, the first of which is do whatever the the sheik says. Carry on, now, carry on.
A pictorial review of the progress of marriage equality in states around the USA.
This one just hurts to watch. And to make matters worse, a smug Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) actually thinks he “baffled” Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate, during this exchange in a hearing today:
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A poll was released today showing that large majorities of Israelis and Palestinians are ready for a two state solution. But TPMCafe reader-blogger Armchair Guerrilla looks deeper into the polling data and finds a considerably less optimistic picture.
For anyone who’s interested in this topic, it’s a fascinating read — both Armchair’s analysis and picked out data and the entire poll report itself. The gist is that while both sides are ready for peace and a two state solution, both sides insist (or seem to insist) on things that are obviously entirely incompatible with a two state solution because they’re non-starters for the other side. For instance, 74% of Palestinians are ready to live in peace in two separate states. And yet, according to poll, 59% said it was “essential” that all of all of the Occupied Territories and pre-67 Israel be an “Islamic Waqf”. 71% seem to say it’s “essential” that the final status result has to be the Palestinian state be all of historic Palestine, i.e., all of Israel and the territories. So there does seem to be some tension there. (This contradiction seemed the most glaring. But there are similar disconnects on the Israeli side. And, notably, the number of Palestinians who view a two state solution as “essential” or “desirable” is actually higher (53%) than the number of Israelis (45%) who answer in those two categories.)
Actually, the wording on those two questions is a bit ambiguous to me. It’s possible that Armchair and I are misreading the questions — and thus the contradiction isn’t that stark. So I’d be curious what others think. Go to the actual data and look at the top questions on page 4 of the PDF. If there is one place where I think Armchair has a point about the authors of the poll having too rosy a read of the data, it is that at a few points in the discussion of the numbers they refer to things Palestinian respondents call “essential” as their “first choice”, which is not quite my understanding of what those words mean, thought perhaps there is a translation issue.
In any case, both sides are willing to have a two state solution. But both sides expect it to include things that are entirely unacceptable to the other side, which is to say that they’re ready for a two state solution on their own terms.
One take on this of course is a counsel of despair. But that’s not quite where I am. I don’t think it’s that both sides really will only accept peace on their terms or that both sides are dishonest about wanting peace. I think it’s more jumbled but also more pliable than that. It sort of comes down to a really bloody and tragic version of that Stones song: You Can’t Always Get What You Want … Both sides would like everything — peace and also all the stuff they want. And the whole situation is so terribly stalemated that there’s little force on either side or purpose to press down to painful trade offs between what you’d like and what you’d settle for. You just keep saying you insist on having your cake and eating it too. Because there’s no cake to have or to eat. So it’s all just a notional question. And why not insist on everything as long as you have nothing? And this, in different ways, on both sides.
One point the poll seems to make pretty clearly is that, contrary to what some say, support isn’t slipping away from a two state and drifting toward a one state solution. Neither people wants to live in a one state with the other. And the poll does an interesting job finding the areas of overlap where one side’s minimum demands find some overlap with the other side’s maximal tolerances. And it is revealing to see where those points of overlap are.
I commend the numbers, whatever they mean, to everyone’s attention.