Well, after waiting for the “statutes of limitations to expire,” as Dick himself put it, Cheney has finally set out to have “heads explode all over Washington” with the release of his all-about-me screed against, well, anyone who isn’t as big of a Dick as he. Predictably, Maureen Dowd, who loves all Republicans except Dick, panned his book in a snarky yet still boring op-ed in the New York Times. No surprise there, but there also have been some barbed comments from his erstwhile co-conspirators, which are considerably more interesting.
First came Colin Powell, who was once aptly called a “house negro” by none other than Harry Belafonte, demonstrating that service in the Bush Administration had given him a humbling reality check in more ways than one. Although he must have been so stung by Belafonte’s remarks that he has now completely turned into a white person vaguely reminiscent of one of the box seat geezers on “The Muppet Show,” he still made a lot of sense, and showed some degree of vestigial dignity in pointing out the obvious fact that Cheney’s book was, well, unworthy of a former Vice President. Powell, as you’ll recall, came by his war skepticism just as honestly as Cheney came by his relentless chickenhawkery; Powell served in his generation’s war (back when he was still black), and Cheney had five deferments and, famously, “other priorities.” Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Then came Lawrence Wilkerson, who served under Powell and sullied his reputation and that of his boss by allowing Powell to, metaphorically anyway, set his pants on fire before the UN in 2003, lying about WMD in Iraq. He stated quite plainly that he would be happy to testify against Cheney as a war criminal if the Dick ever ends up in The Hague. (Unlikely to happen… Dick and Lynne know which countries to avoid as they spend their taxpayer-funded retirement and other ill-gotten gains at places like Jackson Hole and Dubai…) This criticism is unlikely to sting all that much, since the guy worked for Powell, who we now know Cheney thought to be little more than a thinner Michael Moore.
My favorite response, though, came from fellow house negress Condi Rice, who whined, I kid you not, that Cheney had attacked her “integrity.” You can’t make this stuff up, I tell you. No one could have predicted, as it were, anyone attacking Condi’s fabled integrity. Although she hasn’t yet turned white like Powell, her bootlicking response makes Powell look like Malcolm X: (from Reuters)
Rice said, “I am not going to question the vice president’s motives, because he is somebody with whom I had a good relationship and for whom I had, and still have, a great deal of respect.”
She did add that, contrary to Cheney’s telling, she wasn’t the crying kind, which is probably good considering how much she has to cry about (were she a morally functioning human), but aside from that, she pretty much let Cheney off the hook. Who said there’s no honor among thieves?
As the criminals of the Bush Administration continue to roll out their immensely profitable (for them, not so much the publishers) books, it seems petty to remind them that the last bunch of books like this, from Watergate, were written in jail, and as such were a little more interesting. As Oscar Wilde memorably put it, “the good end well, and the bad end badly. That’s why they call it fiction.” Cheney’s book may be a lot of things, but by Wilde’s standards, it certainly isn’t fiction.
