Sidney Blumenthal, Salon, April 14, 2008
After Dick Cheney shot a friend in the face on a Texas hunting trip in February 2006, the national press corps began to speculate about him as one of the great mysteries of Washington, the Sphinx of the Naval Observatory, his official residence. Cheney had been known in the capital for decades through a career that carried him from congressional intern to the most powerful vice president in American history, but now his supposedly changed character became a subject of intense speculation. Brent Scowcroft, who had been George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, and had counseled against the invasion of Iraq, told The New Yorker magazine in 2005, “I consider Cheney a good friend — I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” Scowcroft’s judgment was less about Cheney’s temperament than his policy positions. The press, however, sought to disclose the sources of his “darkening persona,” as a cover story in Newsweek described it. “Has Cheney changed? Has he been transformed, warped, perhaps corrupted — by stress, wealth, aging, illness, the real terrors of the world or possibly some inner goblins?” A cover story entitled “Heart of Darkness,” published in The New Republic, suggested that Cheney’s heart disease had produced vascular dementia. “So, the next time you see Cheney behaving oddly, don’t automatically assume that he’s a bad man.”
In 2000, when Cheney, as head of George W. Bush’s search committee for a running mate, selected himself, opinion makers in Washington greeted the choice as proof positive of the younger Bush’s deference to wisdom and therefore personifying prudence. Cheney’s “manner gives him immunity from the extremist label,” assured David Broder, the longtime leading political columnist of the Washington Post. “Voters who saw his televised briefings during the Persian Gulf War remember the calm voice and thoughtful expression that are his natural style … By choosing a grown-up, Bush gave evidence of his own sense of responsibility.”
Five years later, in 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, by then the former chief of staff to the former Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking publicly at a Washington think tank, the New America Foundation, was less concerned with the press corps’ obsession with Cheney’s shifting images than with exposing his unprecedented manipulations. “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.” Though he had had extensive experience in government, Wilkerson had never before encountered such “secrecy,” “aberration” and “bastardization” in decision-making. “It is a dysfunctional process,” he said. “And to myself I said, okay, put on your academic hat. Who’s causing this?”
The Tattlesnake – The Media Elite Highlight Their Own Elitism Edition
The bored and restless Punditrocracy, maintaining their staunch avoidance of relevance or importance, furiously lit like garbage scow flies upon Barack Obama’s alleged ‘elitism’ for pointing out that people in small towns are bitter and angry at being ignored by politicians once they’ve been elected. He added, if one bothered to listen to more than the out-of-context soundbite of his San Francisco comments, that they tend to vote for things such as guns and God and against immigrants because these are issues which the GOP has carefully constructed as distracting vents for their boiling frustrations. Contrary to the Pundicrats gasping shock at such a blunder as telling the truth – they hate that – Obama didn’t seem to rile voters much with his ‘bitter’ talk – many even agreed wholeheartedly.
Of course the Hill People, sensing the nearness of electoral oblivion, had to get what political mileage they could out of Obama’s ‘gaffe,’ but Hillary herself might have left out the prosaic and artificial-sounding anecdote of her father taking her out as a small child and teaching her how to shoot a firearm. Growing up in the same ’50′s America as Hillary, it just doesn’t seem credible to me that Dad Rodham would have grabbed his young daughter and stuck a 30-06 rifle in her tiny hands – more likely he would have told her to go join Mom in the kitchen for pointers on creating the perfect Kraft cheese casserole while he took his sons out hunting. Ah, well, truth is the first casualty of war and political campaigns.
But the stern media consternation over Obama’s remarks, and their desperate flailing in trying to dub him as another hapless, out-of-touch Kerry ‘elitist,’ reached a pinnacle of absurd hilarity yesterday on MSNBC when Norah O’Donnell, as attractive as she is vapid, chuckled and smirked over Obama referring to the high price of arugula when he was campaigning in Iowa earlier this year. “Why,” hooted O’Donnell, “they don’t even have arugula there!” Although she and her pundit guests didn’t catch it, Norah was displaying her own aloof elitism, as if it were a scarlet ‘E’ emblazoned on her forehead. Our six-and-seven figure Nationally Televised Media don’t get out much among the rabble; if they did, they’d realize the rubes in Iowa, as Media Matters has noted, not only know what arugula is, but grow it and eat it, and even occasionally wash it down with cappuccinos and lattes. (Yes, they actually have Starbucks and other gourmet coffee outlets out in the Hawkeye State, as well as many other parts of Fly-Over Country.) Why, even my local little coffee shop, which used to feature only one humble grind poured by a pleasant middle-aged waitress from a glass Cory carafe, now has some foreign-sounding caffeinated drinks on the menu.
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