Dick Cheney’s endless lies: Why his Playboy interview may be his most shameless yet

[DonViejo]

Cheney is full of it when he says he doesn't think about his legacy. Trying to rewrite history is all he has left

ELIAS ISQUITH

Unlike his former boss Richard Nixon, Dick Cheney has never seemed to me like an especially interesting figure. In complete honesty, while I recognize him as one of the most influential and consequential politicians of my lifetime, I also find Cheney, or at least the version of him I experience through the media, to be rather dull. He’s clearly intelligent and strong-willed; but he’s also myopic and rigid. And despite having quit public office and decamped to Wyoming years ago, he still speaks in the pallid, clichéd and euphemistic language of the national security state bureaucracy, as if he never really left.

Due to his essential flatness, his basic lack of introspection and total absence of doubt, Cheney is not the kind of figure who, after a fall from grace, is usually described as tragic or Shakespearean. He’s more Iago than Macbeth. Yet as I read his lengthy interview with James Rosen in Playboy this week, the former vice president’s answers kept reminding me of one of the iconic lines from “Hamlet,” arguably Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. During the conversation, he tells Rosen, as he’s told others before, that he does not regret his war crimes or care about how he’ll be judged by history. But as Queen Gertrude might say, Richard Bruce Cheney doth protest too much.

The most obvious sign that Cheney is either lying to Rosen or himself — or, most likely, both — is the simple fact that he’s doing the interview in the first place. Indeed, after spending most of his eight years in the White House endeavoring to shield his deeds and words from scrutiny, it seems lately that the once-taciturn vice president cannot shut up. Even more tellingly, it’s not as if the now-loquacious Cheney is sharing his thoughts on the pressing issues of the day and his vision of the future. Somewhat comically, Rosen tries to get him to talk about “the digital revolution.” But Cheney, like always, is much more interested in re-litigating the past, and laying down the narrative that revisionist historians of a conservative bent will no doubt cling to in the decades to come.

With the notable exception of GOP partisans, for example, most people today know that laying the blame for the chaos in Iraq entirely at President Obama’s feet is ridiculous. After all, he’s the man who famously described the U.S. invasion that set fire to Mesopotamia as “rash” and “dumb.” But people in the future, who won’t count the years of the Iraq War among their personal memories, will read Cheney’s claim that ISIS rose because of Obama’s “precipitous withdrawal” and be none the wiser. There are two sides to every story, people will eventually say. And Cheney will, to some degree, escape from having ISIS hung around his neck.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/21/dick_cheneys_endless_lies_why_his_playboy_interview_may_be_his_most_shameless_yet/

[Octafish]

1. Fascist.

Cheney similarly reveals himself later in the interview, when he implies that the way he pressured the Department of Justice to sign off on torture was no different from how things in Washington had always been done. Rosen notes that many would accuse Cheney of corrupting the law “to allow you to do what you wanted,” and Cheney, rather than deny it, says the charge is “fair enough.” But did “FDR ever do that?” he snarks in response, before continuing with a non-sequitur answer about how members of both parties in Congress approved of the program, too. If I’m going down, you can almost hear Cheney think to himself, then I’m taking everyone else with me.

OP: http://www.salon.com/2015/03/21/dick_cheneys_endless_lies_why_his_playboy_interview_may_be_his_most_shameless_yet/

[Rex]

2. Aw come on Octa...you know it is just the BFEE *tee hee giggles*!

You know how funny war mongers are! Tee hee! Just a dream like the Third Way or PNAC! Nothing to talk about here, just pranks.

YEP.

[Trillo]

3. Eww, I didn't need that picture in my mind....

the thought of a naked or nude spread of Cheney is revolting. Shouldn't that interview be in Playgirl?

[Initech]

4. Worst human being alive.

The fact that he isn't in jail yet is a sad testament to our country.

[onecent]

8. AMEN Initech!!!!!!!!!!

[awoke_in_2003]

9. Kissinger is pretty damn close. nt

[PowerToThePeople]

5. war criminal. n/t

[ND-Dem]

6. I've always thought that people like nixon & johnson were "shakespearean" figures,

but I'd never considered cheney under the same glass. Now that I think about it, cheney seems like an 'organization man,' flat, amoral, robotic. Not in the same league as Johnson or Nixon, who for all their personal and political flaws both had elements of greatness, which cheney doesn't seem to have at all. Just a functionary.

[Retrograde]

7. Cheney exemplifies the banality of evil

While the thought of Nixon still makes my flesh crawl, I can concede that the man had some redeeming traits as well as severe character flaws. Cheney, though, seems to have no central passion: being evil just turned out to be his job.

[hifiguy]

10. Cheney is a modern day version of an high-level Nazi bureaucrat.

There is nothing there but cold, hollow, banal evil.

[malaise]

11. +1,000 n/t