Cheney vs. insane Cheney

For any of you who haven't already seen this covered in the press, and for those who might want to contemplate it a bit more, here's the two recently dug up clips of Vice President and obsessive Iraq invasion proponent Dick "Dick" Cheney from before he lost his marbles:

This interview from '94.



Questioner: Do you think that U.S. or U.N.forces should have moved into Bagdhad?

Cheney: "NO, because we would have been all alone...."

"It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq."

If you march in and take down Hussein, "...what are you going to put in it's place? It's a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily see pieces of Iraq fly off."

"It's a QUAGMIRE if you go that far and try to take over Iraq."

"The question was... how many additional dead Americans was Sadaam worth? And our judgement was not very many and I think we got it right."

What happened to this guy?

An author who has studied and watched Cheney's career says nothing. He's always been a cold, calculating person with a lack of humanity, and has always believed that America should be able to do whatever it wants without consequence. It's just that he'd always said what was politically expedient to aid his rise, and it was only as Vice President that he was in a position to finally bend the country to his rather warped will.

The above clip was from when Dick was Sec. of Defense under Bush daddy.

But there's a more recent example of Cheney expressing more rational thinking from an interview on Meet the Press after he'd become Vice President.

From Think Progress:

In 2000, Tim Russert asked Vice Presidential nominee Dick Cheney, “Do you regret not taking Saddam out nine years ago?” Here’s how Cheney responded:

CHENEY: I don’t, Tim. It was–and it’s been talked about since then. But the fact of the matter is, the only way you could have done that would be to go to Baghdad and occupy Iraq. If we’d done that, the U.S. would have been all alone. We would not have had the support of the coalition, especially of the Arab nations that fought alongside us in Kuwait. None of them ever set foot inside Iraq. Conversations I had with leaders in the region afterwards–they all supported the decision that was made not to go to Baghdad.

They were concerned that we not get into a position where we shifted instead of being the leader of an international coalition to roll back Iraqi aggression to one in which we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world taking down governments. So I think we got it right, so suppose it’s one of those things that’ll be debated for some time. But I thought the decision was sound at the time, and I do today. [Meet the Press, 8/27/00]

Desperate to run from his previous statements, Cheney is offering excuses that don’t stack up. Cheney must answer why he told Americans in 2003 that we would be “greeted as liberators” when he had previously expressed concern that we would be perceived as an “imperalist power” that would get stuck in a “quagmire.”

And if this sort of blatant duplicity and just sheer madness gets you down, there's always this clip from Cheney's visit to the ravaged aftermath of Katrina to lift your spirits a bit. Here a young doctor having noticed Cheney's enormous motorcade driving through the moonscape wreckage, stopped by to give old Dick a bit of his own medicine. A classic. (especially the non-chalant way he says it a second time.. cracks me up.)



And in a apt example of the ubiquitous video age we live in, the guy who made the comment to Cheney was shooting video that day and has the "as it happened" home video from his experience as well.

And last, I leave you with this musical tribute to our Vice President.