You know, it astounds me that Dick Cheney would so profoundly embarrass his president, George W. Bush.
But after a rather rocky last six months in office — during which he was largely shunted aside, trying desperately to get a pardon for Scooter Libby and being rebuffed — what does Cheney have left?
While President Bush has exhibited a rather classy exit from power, Cheney has to continue his Limbaugh/Hannity-esque attack on President Obama. I have a strange feeling that he will not go softly into the good night, but will try desperately to resurrect himself, long after this Easter has come and gone.
Cheney’s ridiculous accusations about the U.S. being “less safe” serve no purpose but to try and convince himself that tossing civil liberties to the wind, covering up illegal acts, launching a calculated, unnecessary war in Iraq, conducting it with the utmost incompetence and encouraging torture were all justified. None of these actions, Mr. Cheney, have made us more safe; quite the opposite, actually.
The Cheney foreign policy — go it alone, my way or the highway, we are the answer — took what was a united world against terrorism in September of 2001 and tore it asunder. Mr. Cheney’s policies created more terrorists than we have killed, caused the world to rise up against the U.S. when we needed its support and left our foreign policy in a shambles.
So rather than revisit his Dr. Strangelove persona, maybe Mr. Cheney might want to take a page out of President Bush’s book and try and live out his years quietly as an ex-vice president.