The National Library has a problem. Dick Cheney's book comes out this week and the library is stuck. It seems the Dewey Decimal System has no category for "pure egomaniacal bullshit". The book is titled "In My Time" but should have been called "In My Dreams". To call it fiction dishonors every author who ever tried to tell a good story. Calling it non-fiction would trigger the gag reflex of everyone unfortunate enough too draw to close to the stacks. it maybe historical fiction but, the only actual history aside from the dates, is that the names are mostly spelled correctly. That any tree should have been sacrificed to produce this tripe is enough to make Smokey the Bear take up arson. I tried downloading the book through itunes and the website threw-in a free recording of "It's only Make Believe".
I never expect much candor from a politician in a biography. Having been second-guessed throughout their public lives, political figures write memoirs as a opportunity to explain the decisions they made and share their thought processes. That said, did it really take Cheney 576 pages to say "I was always right and everyone else was always wrong"? In Cheneyworld mistakes were always made by the other guy. The CIA screwed up on WMD. Condoleezza Rice was at fault on yellow-cake uranium and Cheney never heard of Katrina. Honestly, if this book had any more bullshit in it you could toss it in a bucket of cleaning solvent and make a serviceable truck bomb. Half the book is Cheney sitting in his office like Yoda with the great and small parading past to tell him how he was right all along. I was waiting for a paragraph about the time Harry Whittington came by to thank Dick for shooting him in the face.
You expect excuses and obfuscation in these books. Nobody likes to admit they were wrong but this load of cow flop takes first prize at the meadow muffin derby. Waterboarding is the perfect example. Any man with a shred of dignity would have said "9-11 scared the bejeebeers out of everyone. Our first concern was that it wasn't going to happen again. In our zeal to keep the country safe we may have used methods of interrogation which, upon further reflection, now appear excessive." Not our boy Dick. In spite of the undisputed fact that no usable information ever came from anyone while they were being tortured, Cheney defends the tactic and proudly proclaims that its use was justified. Well, that clears that up.
Of particular distaste is Cheney's attack on Colin Powell. Considering that Cheney never did anything more dangerous for his country that jay-walk on Constitution Ave., it takes a special kind of coward to suggest that Powell was anything but a stand-up guy during his time as Secretary of State. Cheney is clearly jealous of Powell's popularity among Americans; most of whom think Cheney is a mean-spirited asshat who makes everyone think of the crabby uncle in the family that no one likes. When Cheney left office he had a popularity rating of 14%. Casey Anthony polled better.
Naturally, I haven't read the book (not with so many copies of The Nation piling up) but it appears clear that, in spite of Cheney's boastful assertion, the only head likely to explode in Washington, was GWB. George had the apparently mistaken impression that he had been President from 2001 to 2009. Turns out GWB was only in charge when the wrong decisions were made. Barnes and Noble will need to tie an anchor to the display table to keep the methane from floating the books away. (They won't leave the store any other way!)
At some point former Vice President Cheney must have felt that the book was a little too self-serving. He needed a neutral, unbiased voice to counterbalance his self congratulatory fist pumping. Fortunately, Liz Cheney was between screeds at Fox News. Having played no part in the Bush administration and having zero insight as to the workings of government, Liz was the perfect choice. (FYI, Liz is the straight one) Dick would have been better served had he selected Bush's Scottish Terrier Barney to help with the manuscript. At least he was at one or two cabinet meetings. Barney is also housebroken and doesn't beg scraps from the table. Liz...not so much.
So it's clear that I don't much like Dick Cheney. It seems unlikely that anything he put in his book was going to change my mind. It would have been nice, however, to be able to say something about Cheney's refreshing reflection on a lifetime of living off the government. He was a congressman from Wyoming so someone must have liked him somewhere. However, if you're ever tempted to think a kind thought about Richard Bruce Cheney, just remember, it was Cheney along with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and a few others who engineered the outright lies that pushed America into two wars and got more than 6,000 Americans killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let him try to bullshit his way out of that.
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