The Annotated Cheney Interview (part 4)

For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008
The Annotated Interview Vice President Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times
Vice President's West Wing Office

Q Sort of along those lines,(see part three of this interview) you've been a long-time fiscal conservative.
(Except of course when you’ve thrown money by the tractor-trailer load at the conflict in Iraq and the ill-suited, woefully mismanaged Coalition Provisional Authority (CPI) or whatever corporation, industry or project would best be served by tax-cuts and federal subsidies. )
How do you feel,
(The quintessential wishy-washy no-brain TV interview soft-ball)
what do you think about the markedly larger size of the government that this administration is leaving behind
(a huge hulking behemoth of bureaucracy worthy of Orwell or Stalin)
-- the size of the deficit,
(Ballooned past all control, past all conception, spiraling past fiscal irresponsibility into a macro-economic insanity; a mind-numbing level of deficit spending whereby you squandered the vast surplus that was the Clintonian legacy – the legacy of what you would call ‘tax and spend liberals’ – and mortgaged the future of the USA to the People’s Republic of China.)
from the financial commitments that the government now has to a lot of private industries?
(Not that so much has changed except for the fact that the ‘bail-outs’ are a lot more visible than the SOP of gratuitous subsidies, tax breaks given on silver platters to the corporate sponsors of election campaigns.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, given your druthers,
(That’s a ‘home-spun’ word I learned from the Brush-clearer-in-chief. Makes me sound kind of loveable, don’t you think? Like Wilford Brimley as the Grand Inquisitor.)
you'd rather not have a growing government in terms of spending,
(Growing in terms of executive power, sure. That was the center-piece of the plan.)
or in terms of authority over the economy.
(Not legislative control but executive control. As St Ronnie said, “The trouble is the government.” And so, we’ve always striven to dismantle and undermine the government of the Republic whenever and wherever we can. )
But there are exceptions.
(And you must admit we’ve been exceptional.)
And the exceptions historically have been wars.
(Luckily. Like the Frat-boy-in-Chief quipped, "We hit the Trifecta.")
We've been faced since 9/11 with a war,
(Of our own making and design.)
more than one in the sense that you count Iraq and Afghanistan separately.
(Assuming that you two goof-offs can count that high. It’s all the same ball of wax to me; defense contracts and bonuses from Halliburton.)
Defending the nation against further attacks from al Qaeda has been a preeminent concern of ours,
(Since we really dropped the ball on in 2001.)
and we've spent a lot of money doing that:
(Papering our asses with your hard-earned dollars)
creating the Department of Homeland Security,
(Which Clinton had in the works already to thwart terrorist attacks - we were too busy dismantling regulatory agencies and passing tax cuts for the rich to bother with until after the Towers fell. Lucky for us it was on the shelf, waiting for us to take credit for it.)
enhancing the security of our shipping container business and the airlines,
(It all comes back to taking care of business – Big Business, that is.)
and all of the other things we've done that have made us a safer nation.
(I feel safer knowing that firms like Halliburton, Blackwater, Bechtel and so on will be safe to profit from unending war as a result of the Muslim world hating our guts.)
And then when you talk about what we've had to do in Afghanistan and Iraq
(Which I trust you will not do but in glowing terms and with patriotic platitudes.)
of the commitment of troops,
(We commit the troops, when they get killed or wounded, the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s to blame.)
the cost of those wars,
(In dollars and cents – not inhuman lives. That’s of secondary concern to us, at best.)
those have all added to the burden.
(The rich, white-man’s burden.)
But I think it's better to do that than it would be to have ignored those needs and requirements,
(Q.E.D.: eo ipso – whatever we did was the right thing to do because doing nothing would have been the wrong thing.)
and seen us not respond the way that the President and I believed we needed to respond to those basic fundamental threats to our nation.
(Say, the EPA and the FCC running amuck with stifling regulation. How can anybody make a buck when you have to worry about wet-lands preservation or public commons. But I digress…)
I think
(So therefore, it's true.)
what al Qaeda represents is a strategic threat of considerable significance.
(Which we have greatly enhanced by the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.)
What happened on 9/11
(Even you dim-wits probably remember the official version of what happened.)
was you had 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters
(Which explains why we need new fighter jets, bombers, nuclear subs, bunker-busters, tactical nukes and missile defense systems. How else do you expect to stop fanatics with box-cutters but by invading two countries that had little or nothing to do with the attacks?)
come into the country,
(where the CIA lost their trail and the FBI ignored them)
destroy 16 acres of downtown Manhattan,
(Prime real estate – figure in insurance pay-offs and re-sale; what a wind-fall!)
do major damage to the headquarters of our military over here at the Pentagon,
(Of course, if it actually had been a 737 the damage would have been truly horrific. Donnie’s office might have had to be redecorated. That’s why we decided to use the weaponized drone. Oops. I think I let one slip.)
and kill about 3,000 people.
(Give or take. Since no bodies were ever found at the Pennsylvania crash site or from ‘plane’ that hit the Pentagon, it’s hard to say.)
and If they had been armed or equipped with a deadly biological agent or a nuclear weapon,
(Or a zombie-making machine or a doomsday device like in ‘Dr Strangelove’ - I love that movie.)
we'd have a much larger problem than we did.
(Duh… )
So I fully support the spending we did because I think it was essential.
(Because it wasn’t my money and it was essential to the industries I serve.)
And it obviously has, as a byproduct,
(A byproduct of incompetency, failures in judgment and a willful and arrogant disregard of human life and rule of law.)
the fact that it increases the deficit and the overall size of government,
(etc, etc… blah, blah blah. How many times have I got to repeat myself? We did what we had to do to ram through our authoritarian agenda. Let’s move on.)
but I think this is one of those occasions like World War II when that was appropriate.
(Except of course that WWII was an actual declared war (i.e a declaration of war was passed by the House and Senate) in response to an attack on US colonial territory by a sovereign nation for the sake of territorial conquest; entirely unlike the Al Qaeda attacks. Not to mention the fact that after the cessation of hostilities, the surviving leaders of those Fascist states which had invaded various countries in Europe, Africa and Asia were brought to trial and executed as war criminals. Let’s be sure not to mention that.)
(to be continued)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html

Putting Words in Dick's Mouth - the annotated interview (part 3)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008
The Annotated Interview of almost former Vice President Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times
Vice President's West Wing Office –
(the one with the man-sized safe)
3:20 P.M. EST
December 17, 2008


Q: As a former CEO,
(Of Halliburton, one of the corporations which has profited enormously from the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan through ‘no-bid, cost-plus’ contracts.)
as you look out at the auto industry,
(Just over there beyond the amber fields of grain.)
an iconic industry of America
(What’s good for General Motors is good for America.)
that is struggling, so difficult,
(Can I get an ‘Amen’?)
if you were going to wave a magic wand,
(Here’s we go with the Neo-Cons’ magic wand, again.)
what would you recommend?
(Let’s pretend you’re getting stock options and $1 million in consulting fees?)

What needs to be done to change that industry?
(Besides expanding federal subsidies and possibly hiring you as a consultant.)

And also, can you give us some sense of what the Bush administration might still be able to do?
(While you guys still have it in your power to screw it up even more than it is.
And… Please don’t bring up any of that tired old clap-trap pipe-dreaming about promoting alternative fuels programs and blah, blah, blah.)

Will the loans really occur before you leave office?
(It’s not that I’m gullible enough to think I’ll get a straight answer to a straight question but my editor suggested it and your office approved it so…)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I can't tell you at this stage precisely what we're going to do,
(Actually I wouldn’t tell you bozos the right time of day if I could help it.)
because the President hasn't decided yet.
(keeping that little white lie alive…)
We're working on it,
(when it doesn’t interfere with lunch.)
and we had a session just yesterday on it,
(While the Frat Boy was clearing brush or whatever…)
looking at the options and so forth.
(It’s come down to just what my ‘cut’ will be of the ‘loan’. I don’t work cheap, you know.)
In terms of looking at the industry generally, I think that obviously it's a very, very important part of the global economy.
(Very, very, very important in that I own stock in that industry.)
I believe that there are a number of companies out there,
(And they know who they are…)
some of them operate in the United States,
(Even though most of their plants are outside the US…)
who are profitable,
(Because of huge, bloated Pentagon contracts)
who are producing products people want to buy.
(People other than the kleptocrats in the Pentagon. Of course, now I’m referring to Japanese and German auto companies.)
And increasingly, we're seeing in places like China and India, and so forth,
(Where there are lax labor laws and no unions…)
a steady increase in the demand for the production of automobiles.
(by US-based manufacturers eliminating the American worker from the equation)
I had a guy in here yesterday from China
(He fit in my man-sized safe beautifully.)
who was talking about the fact that they've quickly reached the point where they'll soon be producing almost 10 million cars a year.
(at least that’s what I thought he said. He was yammering on in Chinese but he wrote down some numbers for me.)
Then it won't be that far down the road
(Get it? I made a pun. And they say I don’t have a sense of humor…)
when China will be producing 20 million units a year
(That’s only 100% increase in production. Should be easy for those godless, Commie slave-drivers.)
-- this contrasted with good years here, we've been doing about 16 million.
(If only we had more godless slaver-driver of our own, our economy would be right as rain. Makes me nostalgic for the days when we could call in the Army to do some good, old-fashioned union busting.)
And so I think there are, apparently, just looking at it from a distance and not being a expert by any means in the automobile industry,
(In other words, I don’t have any more of a friggin’ clue than you nincompoops do.)
about that the American elements of General Motors, Chrysler, and I suppose to a lesser extent Ford, have encountered significant difficulties,
(They are coming with their hands full of ‘gimme’ and their mouths full of ‘much obliged’.)
I think for a number of reasons.
(They make cars nobody wants to buy, for a starter.)
But I'm told they are profitable in many places around the world,
(But I have no idea where that might be.)
but not profitable in the United States.
(Go figure...)
And then I think you've got to analyze
(I know that analysis is way above you pay grade, but I’m speaking figuratively here.)
-- if you're going to try to solve that problem, you've got to analyze why that might be,
(Pretty clever, right? In order to solve a problem, you have to understand what the problem is. I’m pretty sure I figured that out myself.)
and see what changes need to be made in order for those U.S. companies to become economically viable.
(Since they are ‘very, very important part of the global economy’ and all that. Or on the other hand, forget the analysis part of it and just throw huge wads of money at them willy-nilly, and ignore the fact that the industry is lead by avaricious incompetents who have driven their companies into bankruptcy.)

And we
(meaning ‘I’)
-- the President,
(that pampered wanna-be Marlboro-man…)
as he's made clear,
(by reading from the notes I’ve written for him)
doesn't want to see any more economic disorder added to the current problems we've got out there
(Which are nearly entirely due to our party’s own rampant de-regulation of industry and under-funding of over-sight boards and commissions.)
of both the financial crisis and being on the downside of the recession.
(We’ve been floating the concept of there being an ‘upside’ to a recession which we can claim credit for. We’re trying to spin this so that no matter what Obama does, the melt-down is all the Democrats fault.)
So he's looking at all the options.
(By which I mean, he’s screwing off as a lame duck until it’s not our problem anymore.)

(to be continued…)

VPs Say the Darndest Things (part 2)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008

The Annotated Interview of almost former Vice President (and soon to be convicted felon if there is a speck of justice in the world) Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times (well-known brown-nosers and sycophants.)
Vice President's West Wing Office –

3:20 P.M. EST
December 17, 2008

Q You've been described
(By us...)
and attributed to be (sic) one of the most powerful and influential Vice Presidents in history.
(Mind if I gush?)
How would you describe your influence, your power, and your contribution to this administration?
(And please do feel free to be as candid and forthright, as brutally honest in your assessment as you wish. You really, deep down know that you and the ‘Frat Brat’ screwed the figurative pooch. Right!?)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: In terms of whether or not I'm the most powerful and influential,
(I’m glad you asked that question… precisely as Addington wrote it…)
I'll let somebody else make those judgments.
(Someone well-paid.)
I think
(Something I’m very good at if I do say so myself. And I do…)
-- I do believe
(I do. I do. I do. I do believe in pardons. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.)
that the vice presidency has been a consequential office, if I can put in those terms,
(And of course, I can; seeing as I got me a ‘consequential office’. And you young putzes aren’t about to contradict me for anything I say.)
in this administration.
(Mine.)

But that's, first and foremost, because that's what the President wanted.
(Ever since I told the little screw-off that’s precisely what he wanted if he harbored having even a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting and keeping the White House. And still have time to clear brush and play golf.)
He's the one who asked me to take the job.
(Right after he hired me to find him a running mate. I told him that I was my first choice and his only choice if he wanted to do any brush-clearing.)
He's also the one who decided
(He is the decider, after all.)
during the course of his search process eight years ago
(When I told him to hire me. See penultimate annotation above.)
that he wanted somebody who could be another member of the team,
(Team Arbusto; the ‘A’ team.)
who had a certain set of experiences
(…which had lead to anti-social behavior, a loss of moral compass, frequent psychotic episodes of paranoia, an authoritarian mind-set, delusions of grandeur, megalomaniacal tendencies, rapacious greed…)
and so forth, and could be an active participant in the process.
(…of ruining nearly every aspect of the United States; its economy, its environment, its reputation, its institutions, its government, its political position in the world, …)

I know the job of vice president has been terribly frustrating for a lot of people.
(Especially those who felt consigned to a traditional role or one who felt the Constitution a constraint on their ability to grab power.)
Jerry Ford once told me it was the -- the worst nine months of his life were the years he lived, the months he spent -- it seemed like years -- but the months he spent as Vice President.
(Or something like that. Jerry wasn’t much of a story-teller. You get the idea.)

I watched Nelson Rockefeller in the Ford administration
(Not his best role, in my estimation.)
- - he was never happy with the post.
(4 shows a week for three years. Matinee on Saturday. That close to the Oval Office. It broke him.)

And everybody is familiar with the history that it has not been a consequential office in the past.
(Right? Dan Quayle ring any bells for you dim-wits?)
I think that began to change, I think in particular, during the Carter years.
(Blaming it on the Democrats is a tried and true spin to put on anything, don’t you know.)
I didn't agree with much of what Jimmy Carter did,
(Duh… )
but I thought Mondale as Vice President was a good choice for him,
(He sure was easy for Big Ron to thump in the election, that’s for sure.)
and that the office began to have a more significant role in those days.
(How, for example? Better PR? More press conferences? Bigger desk?)
And I think that's gradually grown over time.
(Like a cyst.)
And I think, as I say,
(and I will, and I do, as I have in the past, and will have done in the future, when history looks back at what I thought, and, as I say, I said, time and again.)
I do believe
(I do. I do. I do. I do believe in pardons. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.)
in this administration it's been a consequential post,
(More like a pillar than a post. A stanchion. A shaft, even.)
because that's what the President wanted to have happen,
(or at least so I told him every morning before the briefings.)
and he's been true to his word for eight years.
(Unless you count all that campaign guff about smaller government, personal privacy, lack of foreign entanglements, taking a more humble international role, lower taxes for the middle-class, other similar malarkey, he’s been true blue.)

(to be continued)

From Our Favorite Dick's Own Pie-hole

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/12/20081222.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008

The Annotated Interview of almost former Vice President (and soon to be convicted felon if there is a speck of justice in the world) Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times (well-known brown-nosers and sycophants.)

Vice President's West Wing Office –
(the one with the man-sized safe)

3:20 P.M. EST
December 17, 2008
Q: Sir, let me ask one first,
(that is after all why I’m paying to be here…)
literally talking about your own public service
(pardon if I fawn),
seven presidencies.
(Seven? No wonder things are so screwed up!)
You left one presidency before where the President afterwards, Gerald Ford, became much more popular than he was when he left office.
(Say what? Try writing these questions down first.)
And I'm kind of curious,
(I’m purported to be a journalist, after all!)
as you look at this presidency ending now and where you are in popularity,
(the crapper…)
what you think will happen
(Besides the huge ‘Thank Gawd They’re Gone’ parties world-wide)—
how history might look back at this presidency
(Yours)
and President Bush compared to where he is now?
(deep in the crapper, kind of like my ability to formulate a proper question.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I think there is a parallel in a sense with my experience during the Ford years in that President Ford made a decision that was extraordinarily unpopular at the time when he pardoned former President Nixon.
(But that ain’t nothing compared to Iraq, Afghanistan and the economic disaster we perpetrated, so forget parallels.)
He suffered from it,
(Awww…)
and he dropped to about 30 points in the polls in one week, as I recall.
(About twice what I’m at now.)
By the time of his passing a couple of years ago, opinion had totally turned on that.
(So, I’m really looking forward to when I kick the bucket; my popularity should surge like crazy.)
In fact most people by then, even many who had been very critical 30 years before, were in agreement that, in fact, it was a good decision;
(Just don’t ask me to name names cuz I made that up)
it was the right thing to do from the standpoint of the country.
(Not THIS country, but we’re hoping that it works again, if you know what I mean.)
I don't want to compare the pardon to what we've been doing.
(Gawd, knows it’s apples to road-apples, but the pardon sounds good right now.)
It's just the fact of Presidents making tough decisions and how they are perceived contemporaneously
(good word, right?)
versus what they look like 20 or 30 years down the road.
(Fat, old, bloated, wrinkled and smelling of urine.)
And I myself am personally persuaded
(by I, myself)
that this President
(whatshisname)
and this administration
(Mine!)
will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road,
(when it's really hit the fan and everything is commodified and owned by Halliburton)
in light of what we've been able to accomplish with respect to the global war on terror,
(I mean look how many more terrorists there are now! That’s an accomplishment.)
keeping the nation safe for the last seven and a half years against further attacks by al Qaeda,
(Too bad we missed that first one despite all the warnings but hey! Nobody bats 1.000, right?)
administering, I think, a very significant defeat to al Qaeda over the course of the last few years,
(and by defeat, I mean exponential growth and influence)
of liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(Not counting the dead. Death is a very liberating experience, I’m told.)
I just –
(farted)
I think the set of accomplishments there –
(meaning ‘absolute debacles that would shame anyone with a conscience or morals’.)
establishing democracies in both places with constitutions and free elections
(if by ‘democracy’, you mean puppet states with no choice at all.)
-- those are major, major kinds of changes in the course of history that I think this President deserves credit for.
(Or blame. Ranks right up there with Pol Pot and that Old Joe Stalin.)
And I think they'll be recognized as such in the future.
(And with luck, we’ll die before we’re brought before the International Court.)

(too be continued)

Keeping Terrorists Away

Just read an article entitled ‘Two Dangerous Bush-Cheney Myths’. One is that ‘the Surge’ worked. The other is that torture – or something very much like it - is rationalized (justified?) by the fact that there have been no more attacks on the US since Bush II militarized the war on terror.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/122608.html

This strikes me as much the same rational as related in an old anecdote:

A man is observed shredding newspapers every day in Central Park. After witnessing weeks of this behavior, a passer-by finally asks, “Why are you shredding all that newspaper, day after day?”

The compulsive shredder replies matter-of-factly, “To keep the tigers away.”

To which the passer-by retorts, “There are no tigers in New York.”

The shredder winks and says conspiratorially, “Works pretty well, doesn’t it?”

This is the sort of insane pretzel logic Bush and Cheney are dishing out for us swallow.

I guess we're to assume that attacks on US service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan are not to be considered in this most preposterous syllogism.

Prosecute these people and make them account for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis that have been murdered and the thousands of Americans who have died as a direct result of their insanity.

Prosecute Bush, Cheney and Co.

I'm beginning to take this very personally.

First, at 18, I had the escalating Vietnam conflict to darken my youthful days.
Then Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and Elsberg break-ins to sour the political brew.

Then, Reagan and the Contras with Ollie North and Adm Poindexter cooking up schemes to derail the power of Congress and establish an imperial presidency with 'neat ideas' whereby they sell drugs and run guns to finance the murder of innocent people.

Next up, Bush I with his 'New World Order' and Gulf War v1.0 which didn't need to be fought but looked real good with the marketing groups and played well to the Bible Belt.

Now during the past 8 years, Bush the Lesser, Cheney the Snide and and their Machiavellian band have brought the economy to the brink of ruin, destroyed two Asian countries and is working on the third (Pakistan), brought about the death of hundreds of thousands of people as a result of two undeclared (and therefore illegal) wars which in turn has bankrupted the nation, enthusiastically engaged in torture and kidnapping (known euphemistically as 'enhanced interrogation and 'extraordinary rendition') undermined habeus corpus, the foundation of English Law, eviscerated the Constitution of the US twelve ways to Sunday, and brought shame and opprobrium upon the people of the United States.

If we don't bring these 'evil-doers' to justice, what is to deter the next round of megalomaniacs from breaking the law, degrading our Republic and moving further towards establishing a dictatorial regime in the place of democracy in the USA?

This is no time to let by-gones be by-gones. We must prosecute Bush, Cheney and Co for crimes against the people of the United States and Crimes against Humanity.

Prosecute them and hold them accountable. It's called justice.

http://www.democrats.com/john-dean-wants-prosecution-not-commission

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) Calls for Independent Counsel to Investigate Cheney and Rumsfeld for Violating Torture Laws

Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York has urged Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other senior Bush administration officials for violations of the law relating to the torture of prisoners in US custody. Nadler is the chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/23/rep_jerrold_nadler_d_ny_calls