The Curse of Dick Cheney

In light of recent events surrounding the Grim Veeper and his current 18% "favorability" rating, I feel I have to draw attention to this great 2004 article that I keep going back to from Rolling Stone. I consider it to be quite profound and quite prophetic.

Maybe there really is a Cheney curse? Does everything he touch really turn to failure?

As vice president, Cheney has been the decisive force pushing America into war. In the inner councils of the administration, it was he who emasculated Colin Powell, cut the State Department out of effective policymaking, foisted fake reports on the intelligence agencies and supplanted the National Security Council. It was also Cheney who placed appointees personally loyal to him, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, in charge of the Pentagon and speckled the warmaking bureaucracy with desk officers culled from neoconservative Washington think tanks -- ideologues with no military experience.

"They were like cancer cells," says retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked on the Defense Department's Near East and South Asia desk during the buildup to the Iraq war. "They didn't care about the truth. They had an agenda. I'd never seen anything like it. They deformed everything."
[...]
As the disaster has unfolded in Iraq, [Cheney] has continued to insist against all evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, that the dictator was aiding Al Qaeda, that nothing the Bush administration has done was a mistake. Those who have known him over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. "He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met," says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney's freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: "If I could ask Dick one question, I'd ask him how he could be so unempathetic."

It baffles me how someone like Cheney can continue to get away with the things he has managed to get away with during the course of his career. Is it the permasnarl? Are people just THAT AFRAID of him?

Anyway, check out the article. It's worth a re-read.