Cheney's Host -- A Bit of Background (Frank Gaffney)

[laststeamtrain]

Cheney's Host -- A Bit of Background
Posted by David Shorr

The host of former Vice President Cheney's infamous speech this week was Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy. Not coincidentally, Mr. Gaffney has been a standard bearer for hard-line archconservatism going way back. To offer further context on where these guys are coming from, I feel compelled to give some historical background and recall the denouement of Gaffney's government service. Namely that Gaffney was ultimately too conservative for the Reagan Administration.

In Reagan's first term, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was the Dick Cheney figure, pushing for a confrontational policy toward the Soviet Union, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle played the role of David Addington in relentlessly steamrolling alternative internal views. Frank Gaffney was Perle's deputy. In essence, the Reagan Administration's first-term policy on nuclear weapons and arms control was a preview of the break-your-kneecaps bureaucratic operating style that Cheney subsequently perfected.

During his second term, Reagan shifted his policy toward pursuing arms control rather than eschewing it; he brought in a new defense secretary, Frank Carlucci, and out went Perle and Gaffney. One of the signs of our political times is that in contemporary terms, President Reagan would qualify as a moderate -- which is the difference between him and Vice President Cheney and Mr. Gaffney. (For some more recent examples of Frank Gaffney's radical pronouncements, see Salon.) ,,, http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2009/10/cheneys-host-a-bit-of-background.html

[tularetom]

1. Ron Reagan Jr may have ripped off Gaffney's head and shit down his neck by now

Did you see the little tete a tete between the two of them on hardball the other night?

Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMOBQZwDMAE