Darth Vader Refuses to Die

[babylonsister]

http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/128/darth-vader-refuses-to-die.html

Darth Vader Refuses to Die
by Michael Wolff

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Never before has an American vice president argued for his place in history. Never before has the memoir of a former vice president been a potentially hotter property than that of the former president (no vice president has actually ever written a memoir of any significance).

For nearly seven of the eight Bush years, the point that everyone made about Cheney was that his influence came from his lack of ego and personal ambition. That, we’ve learned, was patently untrue. His influence might have actually come from George Bush’s lack of ego and personal ambition.

The Iraq War; the US terror policies, including the details of our torture methods; and the strategy of worldwide hostility—the key elements of the Bush administration that Bush himself seems now to be shrinking from—are, it seems, more and more likely (if there was any doubt) the Cheney program. And he’s not in the least shrinking from it. Indeed, his obdurate defense makes him the conservative standard bearer.

He strives, it seems, to put on a charmless face. Indeed, the Cheney circle is an unattractive as well as dyspeptic one. The Times dredged up John Bolton, that drunken uncle at the funeral, to praise Cheney. It’s GOP hijinks. Cheney’s got his daughter, Liz, out defending her old man, just as John McCain’s daughter, Meghan, is going after him: “You had the eight years. Go away.”

So what does Cheney want? Or, more to the point, what, given the radical turn of political fortunes, can he expect to get out of his campaign for self-justification?

In a way, it’s a study in pure character. What the man does is not move, or deviate, or modulate. It is all about implacability, about being, in some rather literal fashion, an old war horse. And by insisting on his absolute righteousness, he’ll surround himself with the other Neanderthals of the Bush years. Together they suggest a weirdly proud, and doomed, future of the Republican party.