He started it!

Apparently Dick Cheney wants to talk about torture. Or, as he calls it, “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And that’s pretty much all he has been doing over the last few weeks. So that’s what I’ll talk about here.

To the definitions of torture let us add the well nigh inescapable appearance of the Grand Old Persecutor himself on TV what seems to be 24/7, though I suppose it’s actually less often than that. On the other hand, now that his daughter Liz has joined the fray . . .

I mean, it wouldn’t be such torture if the former Vice President had at least one or two new things to say on his second, third or even sixteenth appearance, on at least one or maybe two of the TV shows (he does save the talking heads the trouble of presenting new news in what is increasingly becoming infotainment), on even one of the networks.

As it is, viewers by now can almost finish his sentences for him. “We kept America safe for seven and a half years”; “I believe that Barack Obama has made us less safe …”; and, of course, “we did not torture.”

Conventional wisdom seems to have it that he really believes this stuff, so it wouldn’t be right to say that he is deliberately lying here, and George Orwell did address this possibility in Nineteen Eighty Four:

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed. . .

Orwell wrote this in 1949, so he had some recent history to draw upon. He wasn’t making it up. For example, the United States Office of Strategic Services made an assessment during WWII of Hitler’s methods, including this:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

I apologize to anyone who is tempted to think I want for a minute to compare Dick Cheney to the man who invaded most of Europe in a quest to dominate the world. No, that’s not where I’m going. I believe Dick Cheney really and truly believes what he’s saying, and that he truly believes the choices made on his watch were in the best interests of America.

And if he doesn’t, then at least he wants us to believe him.

Cynics suggest that he is worried about his own accountability, but I’ll take him at his word, that he is only worried about America.

Call it torture, call it “enhanced interrogation techniques,” call it what you will, most of the respected voices in the intelligence community call it wrong, ineffective, and bad for America’s reputation.

Bob Baer, for example, a former CIA agent who knows a thing or two about it – he underwent torture himself (did you see “Syriana”?) and spoke recently of a close associate who was tortured to death – is absolutely opposed to it; in recent weeks a host of operatives, both intelligence and military, have also spoken out against it from personal knowledge.

I’m going out on a limb here, but it seems to me that most of the folks who support harsh interrogation techniques are people who have never served in the military. Dick Cheney himself managed to get five deferments during the war in Vietnam, and I think it’s safe to say that most of the pro-torture commentators are too young to have seen any action.

But they did watch “24” last night . . .

Speaking of ticking time bombs, I offer this: The President has declared that the United States will not torture. Torture is illegal, period.

So let me leave you with this thought: Imagine you are the President (remember, anyone can be President), and you have a person in custody who is believed to have information that could save the country but could only be gained through torture, which you have declared illegal. What would you do?

Seriously, do you think for a minute that you would hesitate to do whatever is needed? How about, “Damn the torpedos – full speed ahead!”

At a recent press conference President Obama was asked just that question. He reiterated what he had said during the campaign in 2007:

I will do whatever it takes to keep America safe. And there are going to be all sorts of hypotheticals and emergency situations, and I will make that judgment at that time.

So now, will Dick Cheney please finally retire to a ranch in Wyoming, and let the rest of us move on to current crises?

Unleash the dogs!

Back in the sixties, a political friend of mine – Irish-American Chicago politics background – told me that whenever you hear a politician worry in public about something happening, you can be certain that he is working his very heart out behind the scenes to make it happen.

Which brings me to Dick Cheney.

“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The question asked by England’s Henry II about Thomas a Becket almost a millennium ago comes to mind unbidden but irresistibly.

In case you missed it, Cheney gave an interview to Politico in which he said, essentially, that if the Obama administration didn’t conduct matters of security exactly the same way as Bush had, we would be struck again on our homeland by terrorists. He offered chemical, biological and/or nuclear attacks as possibilities.

What on earth could be the purpose in trying to scare us to death again? It’s a rhetorical tactic left over from the campaign of 2004, but why? Dick Cheney and his ideas were disavowed by his own party way before the recent election made it clear that it’s time to move on.

Who knows? Maybe he just wants to be loved.

For the good of the country, it’s time for Cheney to follow the example of his old boss and go quietly into that good night. Head back to the ranch in Wyoming, or Texas. Wherever.

With friends like him, the American people don’t need enemies.
* * *
In other developments, I am so furious with Tom Daschle that I can hardly see straight. How dared he be so cavalier as to think the errors of his judgment would be overlooked? And what on earth are accountants for, anyway?

His failure to act honorably helped deliver a humiliating blow to the Obama administration.

He knew last June that the unpaid tax matter could be a problem, and yes, there might be perfectly acceptable explanations for his situation. But he KNEW it was there when he was vetted by the Obama people and he didn’t tell them until last month.

Tom Daschle has been around long enough to know that unpaid taxes can be a problem for any potential cabinet member – heaven knows, we’ve seen enough go down in flames in the past. What was he thinking?

Add to that the extraordinary amount of income – almost $5 million -- he had received as a consultant since he left the Senate. “Consulting” is a more discreet form of lobbying than Jack Abramoff and friends practiced. It’s legal, but it raises questions and, to make matters worse, he received some of those consulting fees from companies in the medical community.

The dogs of war were let loose: Not just the usual puppies, like John Cornyn (R-TX) and John Ensign (R-NV), but then the pitbull Grover Norquist, the anti-tax guy, emerged from whatever kennel he has been hiding in since he and Abramoff fell out of favor a couple of years back.

(Norquist was a big player in the White House during the Republican years; most famously, he has said he wants to reduce taxes in order to shrink government to a size small enough to flush down the bathtub drain. D’you think he’d get rid of the White House, too?)

So here they were, yapping and snarling again – just like the good old days. As if they never had a scandal in the world . . .

Not only did Daschle embarrass the administration and Obama personally, but in the matter of choosing a Secretary of Health and Human Services he consumed precious time and perhaps even damaged the chances of success for health care reform.

Thanks, Tom.
* * *
Finally, while we’re talking about such things, remember the old adage mentioned here before: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

Along those lines, President Obama’s repeated efforts to work with the Republicans in Congress — traveling up to the Capitol to meet with the Republican caucus, meeting with individual Republican leaders, inviting them for cocktails at the White House, or to watch the Super Bowl game; yielding on one point after another in the stimulus package only to have them reject it again and again — all came to naught.

Toward the end of last week, though, he proved he hasn’t lost his mind. Describing the Republican opposition, he said, “Then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point. No, seriously. That’s the point!”

So here we are, after years of Republican tax cuts that helped get us into this mess, with the Republican leadership in both houses now insisting that only tax cuts will get us out of it. They have claimed they want bipartisanship in Washington, and yet to date only three Republicans — none in the House, all in the Senate — are willing to support the legislation that even most of them acknowledge will provide jobs and tax relief to the American people and small businesses.

Another bit of psychology comes to mind: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.

Witnessing history

Gaithersburg, with a population of 1,020, wasn’t much more than a crossroads in Maryland when we moved there in 1942. About 20 miles outside of D.C., it was a decent commute for someone working in Washington, like my dad.

A perfect family town. Looking back now, it was pretty rural; the “old folks’ home” at the end of our street had a field with cows and the occasional calf us kids loved to pet. Even into the third grade, some kids came to school barefoot. Our telephone number was 9W, though it had grown to 68R by the time we moved away five years later.
We all ran around loose, you might say; there weren’t privacy fences, and the street was for bike riding, softball, and hanging out after dark.

When the trash collectors came by they had to drive their truck all the way down our very long driveway to where the household garbage cans were kept. My little sister and I were just fascinated by that huge truck (though I can see now that it was quite ordinary). We pestered the trashmen for a ride and finally one day, with our mom’s consent, we got to ride in it, all the way back up the driveway!

In the somnolent days of small town life you can understand how little kids might consider this the high point of a week.

Not for long, as it turned out, because the guys who so cheerfully gave us little kids a few minutes of their time and a lot of fun were black.

The neighbors two houses over had 13 kids, and by the end of our ride it seems every doggone one of those kids was lined up along their wire fence to chant, “N----lover! N----lover!” Thus was I introduced to Jim Crow.

It didn’t help that our family were known to be damyankees, of course. We still played together, kids being kids and the town being small, but we were always considered outsiders.

I guess you could consider it an awakening, and as time went by I began to be aware of the signs in front of houses FOR SALE to WHITE ONLY. And at the Saturday movies, where we paid a quarter to sit in a smelly old theater I was told that the black kids sitting on the fire escape had paid their money (but only a dime) to watch the movie through the windows up there. Didn’t seem fair, but that was the way it was in Gaithersburg.

In 1947 we moved to damyankeeland, where discrimination seemed to be based on whether you liked the Yankees or the Dodgers, and life moved along fairly smoothly.

Television came along, though not so early to our house, but those without gathered in the homes of those with, so I got to see Milton Berle in black and white. Back then there was a show called “The $64 Question,” by the way.

In college in Ohio I found kindred souls in the jazz club, whose membership, not surprisingly, was biracial and about half the white members were Jewish, and it became the group I ran with. I learned about jazz, and I learned about race. And, as it turned out, I got another lesson.

I’d taken a job off campus, waiting tables in a local restaurant. The owner, a formidable woman anyway, one day called me to task for having been seen talking to a --- (black man) out in front of her restaurant. To be fair, she was an equal opportunity bigot: when I responded to her tirade by shrugging “What do you want me to do?” she finished with “Aha! A Jewish gesture!” And fired me on the spot.

After a year in Ohio I took a break from college and found a job as a “girl Friday,” eventually becoming quite accomplished on the manual Remington typewriter. (And later came the IBM electric, which evolved into the IBM executive with proportional spacing. Amazing! The Selectric was a wonder, but nowhere as miraculous as the self-correcting Selectric – you had to see it to believe it. Remember those round little erasers with brushy tails? Gone.)

Meantime, the computer came onto the scene. From punch cards to Macintosh: What an evolution! And, free at last, no more carbon paper!

In the late 1950’s I went back to college, supporting my education habit with a job serving cocktails at the Starlight Lounge (it was quite respectable, folks). A majority of the customers were young men from the nearby Air Force base, and by now the military was integrated. But it was still a while before there came an evening when a couple of black servicemen showed up and sat at a table, and my boss instructed me not to serve them.

Quitting a job with tray in hand can feel good; it gives you something to slam down on your way out the door.

But this was in California, and it was 1959, and we were supposed to have come further than this, weren’t we?

During the turbulent 1960’s we all watched and praised and were amazed by the Freedom Riders, young people who risked their very lives, as it turned out, because they believed that black folks were entitled to sit down at a lunch counter, to be treated as equals, and especially to vote. And they went down South to try to help make it happen.

James Cheney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – all in their early twenties -- went to Mississippi to register black citizens to vote. Not long after their arrival they were arrested, jailed, released, followed and rearrested by the police and turned over to the Klan. They were shot to death. We learned all this only after a six-week search, when they were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, MS.

I was devastated, as were so many Americans. The front-page photograph of their bodies being returned to their grieving parents is seared in my memory and tugs at me still.

There have been so many trials for the country, so many injustices, and also some sweet but hard-won triumphs – but you know these things. I’m just offering some personal recollections that inform my own attitudes and state of mind on race in America.

So when I watched and listened to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech the other night, before that audience of 84,000, I was personally affected, and thrilled to be witnessing what may be the end of the beginning of America’s quest for a perfect union.

And I said to myself, “James, Andrew and Michael, this one’s for you!”

Originally published September 1, 2008