[Mb-civic] Maureen Dowd

[Mike Blaxill]

Dick at the Heart of Darkness 
    By Maureen Dowd 
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 26 October 2005

    After W. was elected, he sometimes gave
visitors a tour of the love alcove off the Oval
Office where Bill trysted with Monica - the
notorious spot where his predecessor had
dishonored the White House.

    At least it was only a little pantry - and a
little panting.

    If W. wants to show people now where the
White House has been dishonored in far more
astounding and deadly ways, he'll have to haul
them around every nook and cranny of his vice
president's office, then go across the river for
a walk of shame through the Rummy empire at the
Pentagon.

    The shocking thing about the trellis of
revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled
Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark
conspiracies to juice up a case for war and
demonize those who tried to tell the public the
truth is how un-shocking it all is.

    It's exactly what we thought was going on,
but we never thought we'd actually hear the lurid
details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres
from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running
the country and the world into the ground, driven
by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while
Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or
on his mountain bike.

    Mr. Cheney has been so well protected by his
Praetorian guard all these years that it's been
hard for the public to see his dastardly deeds
and petty schemes. But now, because of Patrick
Fitzgerald's investigation and candid talk from
Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson, he's been
flushed out as the heart of darkness: all
sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly
nicknamed Vice.

    According to a Times story yesterday, Scooter
Libby first learned about Joseph Wilson's C.I.A.
wife from his boss, Mr. Cheney, not from
reporters, as he'd originally suggested. And Mr.
Cheney learned it from George Tenet, according to
Mr. Libby's notes.

    The Bush hawks presented themselves as
protectors and exporters of American values. But
they were so feverish about projecting the
alternate reality they had constructed to link
Saddam and Al Qaeda - and fulfilling their idée
fixe about invading Iraq - they perverted
American values.

    Whether or not it turns out to be illegal,
outing a C.I.A. agent - undercover or not -
simply to undermine her husband's story is
Rove-ishly sleazy. This no-leak administration
was perfectly willing to leak to hurt anyone who
got in its way.

    Vice also pressed for a loophole so the
C.I.A. could do torture-light on prisoners in
U.S. custody, but John McCain rebuffed His
Tortureness. Senator McCain has sponsored a
measure to bar the cruel treatment of prisoners
because he knows that this is not who we are.
(Remember the days when the only torture was
listening to politicians reciting their best TV
lines at dinner parties?)

    Colonel Wilkerson, the former chief of staff
for Colin Powell, broke the code and denounced
Vice's vortex, calling his own involvement in Mr.
Powell's U.N. speech, infected with bogus Cheney
and Scooter malarkey, "the lowest point" in his
life.

    He followed that with a blast of blunt talk
in a speech and an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles
Times, saying that foreign policy had been
hijacked by "a secretive, little-known cabal"
that hated dissent. He said the cabal was headed
by Mr. Cheney, "a vice president who speaks only
to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces,"
and Donald Rumsfeld, "a secretary of defense
presiding over the death by a thousand cuts of
our overstretched armed forces."

    "I believe that the decisions of this cabal
were sometimes made with the full and witting
support of the president and sometimes with
something less," Colonel Wilkerson wrote. "More
often than not, then-national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this
cabal."

    Brent Scowcroft, Bush Senior's close friend,
let out a shriek this week to Jeffrey Goldberg in
The New Yorker, revealing his estrangement from
W. and his old protégé Condi. He disdained Paul
Wolfowitz as a naïve utopian and said he didn't
"know" his old friend Dick Cheney anymore. Vice's
alliance with the neocons, who were determined to
finish in Iraq what Mr. Scowcroft and Poppy had
declared finished, led him to lead the nation
into a morass. Troop deaths are now around 2,000,
a gruesome milestone.

    "The reason I part with the neocons is that I
don't think in any reasonable time frame the
objective of democratizing the Middle East can be
successful," Mr. Scowcroft said. "If you can do
it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the
process of trying to do it you can make the
Middle East a lot worse."

    W. should take the Medal of Freedom away from
Mr. Tenet and give medals to Colonel Wilkerson
and Mr. Scowcroft.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102605M.shtml