Cheney Seeks to Re-Aim Righteous Popular Anger at His Own Enemies

The usually secretive and always sinister Dick Cheney continues to make a ghastly spectacle of himself in his ongoing farewell tour of public interviews, cheerfully admitting to war crimes one day and now blandly confirming the complicity of Democratic leadership with the Bush/Cheney illegal spying and torture policies.

Of course this latest admission of his yesterday in his Chris Wallace interview on Fox News confirms strong long-held suspicions many of us had who were rightly appalled at the "capitulation" of actually unscrupulous and self-serving Democrats the last couple of years in "legalizing" unjustifiable and tyrannical warrantless eavesdropping and also in immunizing telecoms from liability for this (not to mention in taking the Constitutional remedy of Impeachment "off the table"), despite the nearly universal demands of the constituents they claim to represent to do the opposite for the sake of our nation's free future and the rule of law. As usual, it is Glenn Greenwald who has many of the gory details.

As I said, it's not that we didn't know all of this already, but it's quite clear that Cheney's got his gun out again and we all know that he aims for the face. I think it is enormously important for us to be clear about what he's up to. I suspect he's eager to hobble as much as possible the freshly empowered Democratic Party and its leadership at precisely the moment when they are most likely to be driven to and actually capable of undoing some of the deep institutional damage of the Bush/Cheney corporate-militarist executive power grab. It may seem paradoxical, but his best chance to accomplish this feat is to mobilize precisely the righteous anger of the people about Bush/Cheney tyranny, and redirect it at the agents of change actually positioned to implement something like the will of the people in this moment.

Of course, what one wants to do is ride Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman, and Nancy Pelosi out on a rail for their stupidity and venality and complicity in all this. But to do that would likely have mostly the concrete effect of ensuring, as almost nothing else could do at this historical moment, that we lose the only tools we actually have on hand to do anything at all to resume something like the democratizing path of a nation of laws in a planet at peril. You go to war with the army you have, as some asshole once said.

It's truly ugly and it's truly awful, which is no doubt why Cheney is so eager to whomp up this ink cloud of immoral ick at this time in particular. The forces of incumbency thrive best in this ugly and awful world, while the forces of equity and expressivity are divided and demoralized by it.

Millions upon millions have voted for change and are feeling hopeful and empowered for the first time in over a generation -- all that energy has to go somewhere, but if you are a corporate-militarist blood-fat with petrochemical and military-industrial profits and waiting patiently in your web, you know well what it takes to dissipate such righteous passion and derange the trajectories of its threatening reformist forces.

Those who are amazed at Cheney's apparent indifference to his legacy in admitting to all this palpably unpopular amorality, criminality, and tyranny fail to understand that Cheney is a true conservative, that Cheney has never cared at all what even billions of non-rich and therefore non-capable people think about him, and that for Cheney his "legacy" is a matter of preserving the actual institutions of the elite-incumbent "aristocratic" world order with which he has always personally identified, and to the consolidation of which (always, to be sure, to his own personal enrichment) he has devoted all his life's dark energies.

We need to hold everybody accountable for their part in the crimes of this debased epoch, but we need to be thoughtful about the path that accountability will take, patient in the implementation of that accountability, conscious of our actual priorities and attuned to the necessarily stepwise itinerary those priorities impose on the work of accountability, alert to manipulation by privileged and unscrupulous people who seem temperamentally better-suited to such considerations, and take care to preserve a long, strong institutional memory that keeps the drive for accountability fresh enough always to be ready for its right moment when it eventually comes.