The Dick and Condi Shows

It was "great."

First we had Condi (iconic figure symbolic of American social evolution and personal fixation [hers] on the redemptive power of legal and constitutional forms).  She had a tough time with the relatively "soft ball" questions rolled at her by Chris. Wallace on FNS.  He asked her about the DIA analytic paper of February, 2002 on the subject of the likelihood that SH might have shared WMD thingies with Jihadis.  The SSCI report released on Friday cited this report.  The paper said it was unlikely.  Her response was that DIA is a subordinate element in the Intelligence Community and that the WH only listened to the DCI (Tenet) and that he had had an opposite opinion and so "la-di-da!!" 

Well, having been called to WH myself on a number of occasions to talk about DIA papers to presidents, vice-presidents, NSC staffers and everyone else but the marines on door guard, I beg to differ about the willingness of other White Houses to talk to DIA.

Tenet (code name: SlamDunk) may have told them sommat other but he was wrong.  They are both fools.

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Then there was Darth Cheney over at MTP.  "Well, Tim, what part of this don't you understand?"  or "You are not in season, Tim."

This man flunked out of Yale (no?) and is reputed to be "impatient" with the niceties of US constitutional government.  His belligerence, closed mindedness and  dismissal of the opinion of the American people (as expressed in polls) were impressive.  After a while I began to expect (kidding) the Monty Python moment in which a king says "Guards, kill this man!"  His toughness (rhetorical) and dogged Churchillian ferocity made me want to salute until I remembered that this man asked for and received five deferments from the draft during Vietnam.  He reminds me of the creeps who used to walk through hospital wards in VN and pin the Purple Heart on pillow cases,  "With the thanks of a grateful nation..."  Fool.

Pat Lang

Give me the transcript URLs and I will add them.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,213211,00.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14720480/

Comments

[Comment]

Cheney's fifth deferment was probably his most bold - On one of the news sites they pretty much showed how he timed the birth of one of his children , so as to fall within the changing eligibility parameters.

He's schtick is amazing - how he is able to get and sustain enthusiatic applause from audiences like American Legion - even though his deferment history is so brazen as to be ridiculous.

Partisanship is madness in a way. They cannot look at him plain - it's too painful, so they clap and fall for his hawkish clap trap.

Cheney has not been someone to count on - His whole taciturn persona is not an avunucular charm, but a measure of his true dark nature.

[John Shreffler]

Col.,

Thank you. You just made my week and it's only Sunday afternoon.

John Shreffler

[jonst]

Pl,

Just my own opinion, and for my own reasons, but I thought this is the best thing you have written since I first came to the site. The content of it punched me right in the stomach. I watched both shows...the parts I could take before thinking better of it, given my blood pressure issues. I laughed when Condi (a f'ing idiot and phony if there ever was one) tossed Tenant under the bus. They both deserve each other. I almost kicked the TV watching the VP. I not gonna say any more about the man in this forum.

Thank you Col.

[Karen Pena]

Cheney flunked out of Yale twice.

[Waltzer]

Dear Colonel Lang,
Having read your comments about the VP, I could not agree with you more. It seems to me that we have sent our young men and women to die in the theatre of the obsurd.

I myself was a paratrooper in the IDF, serving both in the 6 Day War and the Yom Kippur War. How sad that any glimmer of hope and peace has been frittered away both in the US and in Israel by those who would shed blood rather than release white doves.
Yours, with great respect and admiration.
Simon Waltzer

[lina]

and what about Tenet?

will he ever tell the truth?

or is he too ashamed?

[James Pratt]

Those of us who have paid attention to Arab politics know of the decades long struggle between the main anti-democratic forces in
Sunni Arab society,the military officers and the Salafists e.g. al-Qaeda.
The Salafists don't really run any governments but influence the Arab monarchies and Yemen. The military officers run everything else except Lebanon and Palestine. They have fought each other more than they have fought Israel. For a military officer to make a military alliance with the
Salafists would put him in jeopardy from two sides: the Salafists and his outraged fellow officers.
IMO very unlikely. It's too bad this administration relies on 'experts' (including Bernard Lewis of the Aug. 22 scare)who dislike Arabs and Iranians too much to really be able to understand them or predict the consequences of US actions towards them.

[Michael Murry]

I have never found Dick Cheney anything other than transparently ridiculous. Still, as historian Barbara Tuchman said in her classic March of Folly: "People tend to accept a successfully dramatized self-estimation." So successfully has Dick Cheny dramatized his own estimation of himself, that when he promised our military during Campaign 2000 that "Hell is on the way," many people apparently thought they had heard him say "help." Imagine that.

Anyway, as to the actual details of Cheney's chronic dialectical duplicity on national talk show love-fests like Meet the Press, Arthur Schopenhauer laid it all out in "Stratgem XXXVI" of his nineteenth-century essay "The Art of Controversy," to wit (and Tim Russert, pay close attention here):

"You may also puzzle and bewilder your opponent by mere bombast; and the trick is possible because a man generally supposes that there must be some meaning in words."

"If he [Russert, et al] is secretly conscious of his own weakness, and accustomed to hear much that he does not understand, and to make as though he did, you can easily impose upon him by some serious fooling that sounds very deep or learned, and that deprives him of of hearing, sight, and thought; and by giving out that it is the most indisputable proof of what you assert. It is a well-known fact that in recent times some philosophers have practiced this trick on the whole of the public with the most brilliant success."

[Patrick Kennedy]

Meanwhile Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post has a story about what is happening in the real world. You know, the world that Condi and Dick refuse to acknowledge.


"The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western al Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

....

"Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province's most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report. Another person familiar with the report said it describes Anbar as beyond repair; a third said it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar."


Link

[zanzibar]

PL

When you place the label fool on Condi, SlamDunk and Darth do you imply no malice on their part just genuine but chronic misjudgement?

I watched the rerun of MTP and was surprised at Timmeh. Normally supine, he tried hard to pierce the Darth facade. One criticism that I have of Timmeh is that he did not follow up with the decison making judgement point when Darth excused and absolved himself from blame while pinning it on SlamDunk and the intelligence folks.

Darth has consistently made bad decisions. Giving him more will not produce better outcomes. Its time he is taken out of the decision making loop.

[OldCoastie]

amazing how Condi and Dick are both sticking to their stories about al qaeda and Iraq being connected... and on the same day too!

I'm guessing they don't change their tune any time soon.

[Lightflyer]

Can I throw in a third or perhaps all encompassing term: "Knave".

My little desktop dictionary gives me for Knave:

"Noun, archaic, for a dishonest or unscrupulous man"

Going to the Thesaurus I get: "See JERK, noun sense 3"

For JERK, noun sense 3, I get: "See FOOL, noun sense 1"

For FOOL, noun sense 1, I get: well the list is actually to long to print here.

Point is, as archaic as the term is it offers a hint of venality and stupidity not encompassed by the modern usage of liar.

Anyway, whatever the term, may I offer Tony Blair who has certainly shown elements of all these traits. Saddest of all perhaps, because he at least started off as an honest and clever man.

[Frank Durkee]

Simply put me in the "Amen Corner" on this one.

[Got A Watch]

Has anyone else considered the highly likely theory that the Bush Cabinet is entirely made up of animatronic robots, remotely controlled by Karl Rove from a secret underground bunker? It would explain just about everything about the Bush Administration.

[searp]

It is nave to think that these people are stupid.

W had a failing administration from its very beginning. Thought to be illegitimate by a large chunk of the population and with no energizing policy initiatives excpt tax cuts, he was well on his was to becoming irrelevant.

9/11/01 happens, and all of a sudden the administration has a political raison d'etre: the GWOT.

No matter how poorly prosecuted, the GWOT meant votes and support, and someone in the administration was smart enough to realize it. The more vigorously and publically the GWOT was prosecuted, the higher the level of support.

Viewed from the perspective of domestic politics, it is the GWOT that has kept this crew in office and in power.

Now tell me they are dumb.

[Jaime Gormley]

Glenn Greenwald/Unclaimed Territory illuminates Cheney's foul residue:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/fighting-to-make-iran-and-al-qaeda.html

Let's not judge Cheney too severely. No one is completely useless; they can always be used as a bad example.

[Frank Durkee]

Col. Have you information concerning or have you read Col. Pete Devilin's report on the situation in Anbar Province, Iraq? If you have would you comment?
Thank you.

[Hal Carpenter]

Dear Col. Lang,

A great article..

I saw part of Rice's interview and I was most embarrassed that she is the Secretary of State and not some second tier political flack. As she hammered Tenent in her obviously prescripted political assault, her uselessness as a diplomat became glaringly obvious.

As far as the snarl in the baggy suit, it is just beyond me how ex-military men our age can sit and cheer for such a man. What appeals to them, his cruelty, his cowardice or the fact that he's been wrong on every major decision of the Bush administration?

How can anybody believe that this lying son-of-a-bitch has done anything for Americans whose net worth is less than $25 million?

Thanks for the topic, Col., although I will never understand the hate and fear in teh American character that Cheney has spent his life growing rich and powerful from exploiting.

Hal Carpenter

[McGee]

Michael Murry - thank you for the Schopenhauer reference. Nailed Cheney's continued maipulation of Timmy perfectly (Russert remains one of the least-well educated products of a Jesuit education to ever attain national prominence for anything outside of criminal activity, IMHO). The level of discourse at this website continues to impress. Thanks, as always, Colonel....

As for Madame Supertanker - whenever she's visited Russia I've made an effort to monitor the local press waiting for this bi-lingual Soviet Studies expert to utter a word in Russian. The one time she tried she put her foot in her mouth pretty badly. Otherwize no mention of a word of russki passing her lips that I've noted. When she was first appointed National Security Adviser I looked up her doctoral thesis (on the Soviet military and Czechoslovakia). It was very harshly critiqued by its reviewer in the journal in which it was published. The overriding subtext of the historian's review was that it would've been useful if the writer had thoroughly studied Czechoslovakia and the Soviet military before making so many false assumptions. (Sounds a bit like our present foreign policy in a nutshell, no?)

In essence a fair argument could be made that none of this crew are qualified in the least for any of their jobs...

[jang]

Perhaps it is time to try to articulate the reason why 42% of Americans think that 911 is linked to Iraq or why would we be there? After all, Cheney, with all the power and gravitas of the Office of the V.P., tells us it is so. He may insinuate that he is imparting only 99& 44/100ths % of the truth, but he leaves the definite impression that if we could see the secret information that he sees we would finally understand and agree with his position. Nearly impossible for most television viewers to believe that such a man could tell other truth with such conviction.

[arbogast]

Why is the country going to return a Republican Congress in November?

That is the question.

Do they like the Cheney act?

Do they care?

Are they fools?

[FB]

Colonel:
This is not a comment on this post, but is the only way I have of writing to you.

I would recommend that a discussion would be very worthwhile on Ahmad Rashid's article in today's WP (at http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/10/AR2006091001145.html).

The following points it makes are worth discussing:
- The Islamists are successfully adapting their strategy and tactics to the war being waged against them. The lessons learned in Lebanon and Iraq are being copied.
- The Pakistan army has failed in its bid to clean up the Taliban and al Qaeda from its tribal areas, and has had to retreat.
- These tribal areas will now become a base for Islamists to wage war worldwide.
- The next theatre may well be the Caucasus and Central Asia.

FB Ali

[Duncan Kinder]

From a foreign policy perspective, even in Britain support for the United States is weakening. Even serious conservatives are distancing themselves from Bush:

LONDON, Sept. 11 — In his first major foreign policy address, David Cameron, the leader of Britain’s opposition Conservatives, sought today to distance his party from what he called a “slavish” bond between Britain and the United States established by Tony Blair.

[Keone Michaels]

Once again, I salute you. Your elegant turn of phrase makes it a pleasure to read as you speak truth to power. I blush to remember I once questioned your voice. Please keep telling it like it is, I'll take care of the profanity.

[Michael Murry]

McGee: Thanks for the Jesuit education reference, although I wouldn't hold up Tim Russert as much of an advertisement for it. On the other hand, the Jesuits did educate Voltaire -- and lived to regret it. I especially love that scene in Candide where the optimistic young hero escapes becoming dinner for the cannibal Oreillons when the natives discover to their joy that "He's not a Jesuit, he's not a Jesuit!"