The increasingly psychotic Dick Cheney........

[marmar]

from ThinkProgress:



Cheney: staying in Iraq is like pardoning Nixon.»

Recently, in an interview with ABC News, Vice President Cheney defended his administration’s refusal to heed the public’s desire to get out of Iraq. “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls,” he said. The Washington Post notes that in a follow-up interview yesterday, Cheney compared decision-making on the Iraq war to President Gerald Ford’s unpopular decision to pardon Richard Nixon for the Watergate scandal:

Thirty years later, nearly everybody would say it is exactly the right thing to do, that if he’d paid attention at the time to the polls he never would have done that. But he demonstrated, I think, great courage and great foresight, and the country was better off for what Jerry Ford did that day. And 30 years later, everybody recognized it.

And I have the same strong conviction the issues we’re dealing with today — the global war on terror, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq – that all of the tough calls the president has had to make, that 30 years from now it will be clear that he made the right decisions, and that the effort we mounted was the right one, and that if we had listened to the polls, we would have gotten it wrong.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/25/cheney-staying-in-iraq-is-like-pardoning-nixon/

[wtmusic]

1. The "tough call" will be bringing you to the war crimes tribunal, Dick

but 30 years from now everybody will say it is exactly the right thing to do.

[Shae]

2. Cheney doesn't answer to us...

A big "F*** you" to public opinion.

[SteppingRazor]

3. Dick, I gotta disagree.

First, the idea that pardoning Nixon was a good idea and that "30 years later, everybody recognized it."

Well, that's simply untrue. I, for one, think it was a terrible idea. So, that pretty much takes care of "everybody."


But its the precedent here that's even more mistaken -- the very notion that pardoning Richard Nixon was a good idea. After his presidency, Nixon famously said, "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." Ford's pardon only reinforced that fact -- that the president, instead of being a first among equals and a servant to the citizens of this country, is something more than the citizens, something greater. Immune to punishment, indeed, immune to justice. His stepping down was the merest political expediency, not punishment, though it did mark the end of his official career.

But Nixon was a force in politics till his dying day. Hell, even Clinton showed up to his funeral -- he was still that important, that far from true disgrace.

The pardoning of Richard Nixon was not merely a miscarriage of justice. It was a proof that the rich and the powerful, at the highest, rarefied limits of that power, are wholly immune from the laws that we ourselves abide by. The pardoning of Richard Nixon revealed that we are, at our extreme, not at all a nation of laws, that there is no forward motion at the heights, and that as far as we may wish to climb, it is impossible for those on top to slide to the bottom. To borrow a phrase from Hunter Thompson's obituary of Nixon, "by disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream."

Pardoning the man who broke us all upon the unmovable force of his own ego? No, Dick, that was not a good idea.

In fact, it would perhaps be the worst thing Jerry Ford ever did, were it not for the fact that he gave a young up-and-comer in the Republican Party the White House chief of staff job, thereby setting in motion a career that would eventually see you, Dick, rise to those same heights of power that Nixon once enjoyed. And like him, you too will slink off when your time is over, to spend your waning years radiating a slowly ebbing malignance, like the last destructive rays of a dying star. And you will never see the inside of a prison cell, and you will never know the loss of your freedom or your reputation, such as it is. And when you finally die, whoever may be president will come to your funeral. But that doesn't make it right.

[jimshoes]

4. Who says pardoning Nixon

was the right thing to do? The only thing it staved off is having to deal with a bunch of treasonous plotters another day, like now.

[frogcycle]

5. not psychotic

megalomaniac
or is megalomania a psychosis? Whatever...

see my commentary on Mr. Richard Bruce Cheney (aka Ernst Stavros Blofeld) here:


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=5248031&mesg_id=5248031

[sinkingfeeling]

6. In 30 years, 'everybody' will agree that invading Iraq was the exact opposite of

doing 'the right thing'. They will either still be humiliated by having killed millions of Iraqis or be terrified of the 'blowback' from the Middle East.

[ensho]

7. he said that and then he smirked

please someone arrest him