The Cheney Resume

Wow. The occasion of Scooter Libby's indictment seems to have caused a few people to look a bit more closely at Dick Cheney. I don't know if nowadays we're just not used to such hard-hitting journalism from what's become a lapdog liberal media, but James Carroll's "Deconstructing Cheney" in yesterday's Boston Globe (via Atrios) is about as harsh an attack as I'd expect to see in a mainstream paper. Setting out "to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States," Carroll identifies misstep after malevolent misstep throughout Cheney's public life.

As Donald Rumsfeld's assistant in Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity, he helped undermine antipoverty programs. Again working with Rumsfeld in the Ford White House, he "set out to destroy detente, the fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union." Of course, as secretary of defense for George H. W. Bush, he rose to an even better position for such shenanigans: "Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to refreeze it." Here's Carroll's framing of the first Gulf War: "Against Cheney's own uniformed advisers (notably including Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell), he forged Washington's choice of violence over diplomacy."

And I haven't even mentioned what Carroll's got to say about Cheney's reign as vice president. Although it doesn't carry the legal heft of what Patrick Fitzgerald launched against Scooter a week and a half ago, James Carroll's moral indictment of Dick Cheney is far more ferocious.