In The Long Run

by digby

Dick Cheney explains why he doesn’t care care what the people think about the war in Iraq:

The president of the United States, under these circumstances, dealing with these kinds of issues, can’t make decisions based on public opinion polls; he shouldn’t. . . .

I had the experience, for example, of working for Jerry Ford, and I’ve never forgotten the travails he went through after he had been president for 30 days when he issued the pardon of former president Nixon. And there was consternation coast to coast…I know how much grief he took for that decision, and it may well have cost him the presidency in ’76.

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.

Gee, I wonder if the Bush Doctrine includes a provision for premptive pardons?

Cheney’s memory is a great fallacy that haunts us today, just as the misbegotten Iraq war will haunt us 30 years from now. It was a huge mistake to pardon Richard Nixon and I say that as someone who thought it was the right thing to do at the time. I was very young and had a soft heart and thought that it was gratuitous to punish him more after his terrible humiliation and that it would be good for the country to “move on.”

Allowing Nixon to get away with his crimes while his fellow Republicans angrily stewed over the injustice of his downfall is what led to the ongoing usurpation of the constitution under Republican rule. They believe the president is above the law and the constitution. Why wouldn’t they? They do these things and there’s no accountability so they do it again the first chance they get, always upping the ante. When they finally lose an election and take a breather from illegal wars and pillaging and shredding the constitution, the Democrats are so busy beating back political attacks and trying to clean up the mess that they decide accountability isn’t worth it. They “bind up the wounds” allowing the infection to fester until the next time it happens.

Cheney thinks that history vindicated Ford and therefore history will vindicate him too. Not in a million years. History will show that from Nixon to the Codpiece, the Republican Party has been progressively more criminal and more aggressively undemocratic and imperialistic. But the problem is, to quote our Dear Leader(ironically paraphrasing Keynes and not even knowing it) “history … we’ll all be dead.” And unfortunately, a lot of people are dead much sooner than they need to be because people like Dick Cheney know they can get away with murder.

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