Bush, Cheney baring their souls

WASHINGTON — Nobody knew exactly what Julius Caesar thought as he “left office” — the assassination was too swift! People are still speculating as to what John F. Kennedy was really thinking. One favorite topic of political discussion still bandied about is whether the adored president would have gotten us out of Vietnam quickly.

And who really knows what went on in a consummately evil mind like Adolf Hitler’s as he plotted to kill himself, leaving no notes, rather than face the music of the victors. Or in a consummately good mind like Anwar Sadat’s as he was gunned down by the very men who were supposedly his own.

We’ll never really know what these leaders were thinking, but in these last few weeks before the turn of the New Year our formerly mysterious outgoing president and vice president have been busily baring their souls before the press.

President George W. Bush, to start with, tried in a series of interviews, and in particular one with The Washington Times, to present himself as a kind of socially conscious conservative. He told the paper he had worked hard to lift minorities by expanding opportunities for small businesses. “No Child Left Behind is a piece of civil rights legislation,” he was quoted.

While he naturally spoke in all of the 10 interviews granted as of this writing about the wars, his stress in the Times interview was on leaving behind a safer country, plus leaving the “tools behind so that future presidents could have the intelligence necessary and the means necessary to respond to intelligence to protect the country.” He spoke almost apologetically about the wars-within-wars that he had embraced with such fervor and certainty.

What are we to make of these Bush revelations, coming as they do at a time when leaders grow reflective, if only out of exhaustion or merely trying, at least for themselves, to make some sense out of their lives and tenures?

Ameliorative uncle

While time will surely tell other things, it seems strange to me that George W., after the “aw shucks” big cowboy image he has burdened us with for eight years, should now be trying to appear as the kindly, ameliorative uncle. Perhaps he’s just tired of being criticized; perhaps this is some kind of return to his past persona when he was the charming, likable governor of Texas, or to his “inner Bush,” as some have put it. But he surely paints himself as a different person.

At the same time, Dick Cheney’s vice presidential interviews — as of this writing, he has given four — could not present a more unchanged man. The unsmiling, unrepentant and, in fact, wholly unpleasant Cheney remains totally sure of himself. On “Fox News Sunday,” he outlined how historians would look favorably on the Bush administration’s efforts to keep the nation safe, and insisted that the Bush White House had been justified in expanding executive authority in everything from the war in Iraq to the torture of terrorism suspects to domestic wiretapping.

The American president “doesn’t have to check with anybody” — and that means not the Congress, not the courts, not ANYBODY, get it? — before launching a nuclear attack to defend the nation “because of the nature of the world we live in” since 9/11. (Yes, he did say “nuclear attack”.)

Unitary power

In fact, he would do exactly the same things again, and again and again, while he said repeatedly that 9/11 had brought on the need for an executive that was one of unitary power — that is, the president and the vice president holding total power in the nation. In fact, Dick Cheney in 1991 wrote a now infamous paper pronouncing, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, that the United States must be the single unitary power in the world — and that no other power or grouping of powers should be permitted ever to challenge it.

Instead, he and his rarefied ideas have left the United States in a financial collapse so severe some economists are calling it the “failure of an entire system,” hated by the entire world and openly challenged by everybody but, well, leave out Somalia, Paraguay and Bangladesh.

Universal Press Syndicate