From the Oct. 10 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' comes this illuminating exchange:
OLBERMANN: Any student in Dick Cheney 101 knows that the roots of his desire to be king maker, if not king, were planted during—how he perceived Watergate. How did he come away from that era believing that the country damaged the presidency and not the other way around?
JOHN DEAN: Well, I think Cheney 101 also shows very clearly how a man, the higher he rises in office, doesn‘t change, but he reveals himself even further. And when he, for example, took the position after Watergate that that has somehow weakened the presidency, he claimed that Nixon just didn‘t stay and fight long enough. He just ignores, again, the fact that the evidence was overwhelming. The man was looking for an impeachment conviction. It was not just Democrats. It was Republicans. But he thought they should have waged the battle and they gave in too soon. Maybe defy the courts or come get us because we are the commander and chief, we got the troops. He never has explained this but it is a fallacious argument.
I have never imagined anyone would be delusional enough to believe that Nixon could have survived the Watergate scandal just by being stubborn, but there it is. No matter how absurd the position it’s consistent with Cheney’s entire philosophy of governance. Not merely his belief in the unassailable power of the presidency, but the idea that reality itself will bend to the imperial will. The very first post on this blog nearly three years ago decried institutionalization of this fallacious stance.
Cheney famously said that deficits don’t matter, and why should they? They are, after all, a result of measuring and accounting for real costs and revenues in actual real-world dollars. One can only imagine Cheney locked in his undisclosed location donning his imperial robes and chanting his mantra of power. “Deficits don’t matter, subpoenas don’t matter, Congress doesn’t matter, the courts don’t matter, jury verdicts don’t matter, science doesn’t matter. There is no reality; there is only power and my will. My will is law.”
We could have had a Nobel laureate for a president – someone who has devoted his life to rational responses to carefully measured, if inconvenient, truths. Instead we have one man who thinks he talks to God, and another who thinks he is God.
- jack*
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