Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Worse than Watergate 2: Cheney and the Neocons
According to John Dean in Worse than Watergate: the Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, the current administration's penchent for secrecy comes in large part from an agenda defined by Cheney's neoconservative values. The American people have believed that they were getting a moderately conservative Bush-Cheney administration, (that's where compassionate conservatism comes in handy) and that 9/11 forced a sharper turn to the right to accommodate the need for tighter security.In fact, 9/11 was just what the administration needed as a pretext for the values that it had kept in the background (like Cheney himself) while Bush went around jollying it up with the public, pressing the flesh and coining his signature nicknames. In his literal and figurative bunker, Cheney created a shadow national security council of his own advisers, according to Dean, beyond the reach of Congress. With Cheney's powerful role in the administration (given Dubya's intellectual laziness, isolation, and comfort with having others do his work for him) Cheney and his fellow neocons are free to press their policies on the rest of us. Their policies are based upon the following assumptions (there are more in the Dean book; I condense here):
--They believe in a powerful federal government;
--They believe that the end justifies the means in politics, that hardball in politics is a moral necessity;
--They believe lying is necessary for the state to survive;
--They believe certain facts should be known only by the political elite and withheld from the general public;
--They believe in preemptive war and the naked use of military force to achieve any desired ends;
--They openly endorse the idea of an American empire and unapologetically call for imperialism;
--They are willing to use force to impose American ideals (or at least their version of them);
--They believe 9/11 resulted from a lack of foreign entanglements, not from too many of them;
--They are willing to redraw the map of the Middle East by force while unconditionally supporting Israel;
--They view civil liberties with suspicion, as unnecessary restrictions on the federal government;
--They dismiss any arguments based on constitutional grounds.
In the next blog we'll look at how these values and the neocons' contempt for anything from the Clinton Administration combined to turn Cheney away from pursuing the very sort of activity that might well have prevented 9/11.
# posted by Lulu Maude @ 10:01 PM 
Comments:
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I must say I had pretty well assumed most of those points with da Shrub, Cheney and Rummy. Rummy is a leftover from the Nixon era and always felt "they" got screwed over. He is trying his hardest to "right" the ship so to speak.
Bascially the Federal Government takes prescedence over anything including the constitution and our rights..correct?
I await your next post..
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Bascially the Federal Government takes prescedence over anything including the constitution and our rights..correct?
I await your next post..
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