Thursday, February 22, 2007
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5 comments:
Yes, but I do wonder whether such people are actually achieving their needs. The public may be fed one truth, with them pursuing a hidden other. That seems one way to understand the madness that surrounds.
Poisonous words hidden: enclosed in clubs, shrubs and thorns.
I liken them to modern Mussolinis: insidious, aggressive, stupid and doomed, wrecking other people's lives along the way. The banality of evil.
Last week, federal investigators identified $10 billion they said has been squandered in the war because of contractor overcharges and unsupported expenses. More than a quarter of that amount, $2.7 billion, was charged by Halliburton.
Committed, indeed. Isn't it inspiring?
There could be no less effective spokesman for American concern or for the interests of international order than Cheney. This is the man who has refused to answer to his own public for -- well, for anything. For his insistence that everything has gone just as planned in Iraq. For his claim before the war that "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." For his claim after the war that the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes." For his role, as described in prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's closing statement, as the central, unindicted malefactor in the Scooter Libby case. Even for shooting his friend in the face. Say what you will about Al Gore's wooden "no controlling legal authority" rationalization when he was asked to explain campaign donations he received. At least he acknowledged some duty to explain things to the American public.
Dick Cheney, the man who is accountable for nothing, is the person who will tell other countries what is "consistent" with a peaceful image in the world?
If you haven't spent a lot of time outside the United States recently, you may not been made aware in a painful, humiliating way of how grievously America's moral standing has suffered because of Guantanamo, Abu Grahib, and the general carnage in Iraq. It's hard in general to get non-Americans to listen to lectures about seemly behavior these days. It's hardest of all when the lectures come from the man who, to the rest of the world, personifies America's squandering of the qualities that made it special.
Dear Mr. Vice President: there may be valuable things you can do. But telling anyone else how to cultivate a peaceful image is not one of them. Go home, and shut up.
-- James Fallows
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