Cheney Thinks He Knows What True Leadership Is

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• 1 - Sonora

  Sep 18, 2004 at 10:01 am

  Cheney is a lying puppetmaster who seeks for nothing but his own profit. If the republicans rig this election like the last one (throwing out the black vote, etc.) there won't be anywhere to spend his precious war booty.
  
  The country is in chaos. We're fighting another war far worse than Vietnam, sending civil rights back to 1950's levels, destroying the environment at a dizzying pace, and now Bush/Cheney is talking about taking peoples Social Security and putting it into Halliburton.
  
  When they say the Democrats have lost their patriotism, sadly I must agree. A true patriot would take up there right to bear arms at this juncture and force the government to cast off out this tyranny from the top. Bush shouldn't be debating Kerry in a few weeks, he should be debating a UN war crimes tribunal. Most countries would be laughing at our ignorance if it wasn't so damn scary. Please, I beg, let's do ourselves and the planet a huge favor and and get a Democrat into office this November.
  
  

• 2 - KBeilke

  Sep 18, 2004 at 10:36 am

  I hope those aren't your honest views, because if you are serious then you are out of control.
  
  "Bush/Cheney is talking about taking peoples Social Security and putting it into Halliburton"
  
  Huh?

• 3 - Marc

  Sep 19, 2004 at 7:18 am

  Damm, mighty impressive rant! But not nearly as good as mine!
  
  To bad yours is mostly based on thin air. Lets go thru a couple points.
  Is it "true leadership" to help cement Iraqi reconstruction contracts for what is supposedly your former company? Surely you have read the many reports that Cheney has severed all financial ties to his former company. He does receive his rightful pension payments. All perfectly legal. But you knew that correct? You just chose to omit that to add a little flavor to a mostly bland entry.
  
  And as if the lucky stars are shining, just today MSNBC reports no evidence of wrong doing:

  Details about the genesis of those secret contracts have become part of an intensifying election-year effort by Democrats in Congress and the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry to question whether Halliburton became one of the Defense Department's favorite contractors because Cheney is vice president.
  
  No one has presented evidence that Cheney made as much as a phone call on behalf of his former company in the run-up to the war, or since. But Halliburton's repeated missteps and legal troubles, the surge in its government business, and apparent contradictions in statements by Cheney and other administration officials have kept the issue alive.

  Oops... nothing to see there. Lets look at Halliburtons profits since before the war until now. Oops... looks like they lost money, nothing to see here either! Your 0 for 2. But as long as we are on the subject of war profiteers lets look at who wanted to keep Saddam in power. No surprise here, France tops the list followed by Germany, Russia, China and last but not least the US. And isn't it interesting to note that in twenty years (1981-2001) the US was ranked 11th largest arms supplier to Iraq. Guess we didn't enable Saddam to be a depotic terrorist after all.
  
  Is it "true leadership" to construct pre-emptive war plans in secrecy in an "Office of Special Plans"?
  
  Why do I even bother, you obviously have not read the 9/11 report, or chose to view it thru "partisan goggles."
  
  Here is a pre-emptive strike for you. Because you surely also are a keeper of the Cheney draft deferment meme.
  
  Cheney did receive 5 deferments, 3 of which were mandated by law because of school transfers. And again, just today the LA Times has agreed with that. So in effect he received the same amount as Kerry - 2. Kerry was under one deferment then was turned down for the second when he tried to study in Paris for a year. The rest is history, he became a War Hero.
  
  And just because I can here are a couple of Kerry examples. The first Kerry tried the appeasement game and was on the Wrong side of a war. The second example is Kerry failing to correct a flawed election, and was on the Wrong side of Democracy. Enjoy.
  
  Nicaragua
  
  In Spring 1985 then President Reagan as part of his anti-communist agenda was at odds with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. (Who recently expressed his solidarity with Saddam Hussein upon his capture by US forces), As Nicaraguan President, he attempted to consolidate the Sandinista revolution along Marxist lines but was opposed by Reagan and U.S.-backed guerrillas, the contras.

  On the eve of a major Senate Vote on the issue of aid, John Kerry and Tom Harkin [Yes the same lying Harkin - ed] jetted off to Managua for a weekend of intensive talks with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. The pair departed after holding a press conference to announce a study which listed dozens of supposed lies that the Reagan administration had told Congress and 15 allegations of law breaking (the study was done by the hard-left Institute for Policy Studies). Kerry and Harkin returned with a three page "peace proposal" given to them by Ortega.

  Secretary of State George Shultz was livid: ""It's presumably not lawful for citizens to appoint themselves as negotiators for the United States," Shultz declared. "Members of Congress have every right to travel to Nicaragua to review the situation, but we cannot have a successful policy when they take trips or write 'Dear Commandante' letters with the aim of negotiating as self-appointed emissaries to the communist regime." Shultz called for the censure of the two senators. Washington Post reporter Myra MacPherson, who apparently accompanied the dynamic duo, related some quotes that should sound very familar:

  'Look at it,' Kerry said as their plane touched down here Thursday night. 'It reminds me so much of Vietnam. The same lushness, the tree lines.'"
  
  'If you look back at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution,' Kerry said, 'if you look back at the troops that were in Cambodia, the history of the body count, and the misinterpretation of the history of Vietnam itself, and look at how we are interpreting the struggle in Central America and examine the CIA involvement, the mining of the harbors, the effort to fund the contras, there is a direct and unavoidable parallel between these two periods of our history.'"
  
  "[I]n all our talks," said Kerry, "we found no enthusiasm, even among those who are for the contras, for keeping this war going."
  
  "Kerry responded, 'I believe Nicaragua understands beyond any doubt the United States will never tolerate a Soviet or Cuban base here. But we've got to create a climate of trust. Look, let's try it! It's better than killing people. Then if it doesn't work there will be a lot of congressmen and senators who will feel betrayed and won't have much hesitation about making a change. I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do. Our economic squeeze on them is very sad. The whole population is suffering."
  
  "If we haven't learned something by now about talking rather than fighting . . ."

  And as history shows the economic embargo was successful in the eventual take down of Ortega's Marxist government. In this case Kerry "reported for duty," but his "immediate chain of command" worked for the wrong side.
  
  
  Philippines
  
  In November 1985 President Ferdinand Marcos under extreme political pressure called for snap elections in an attempt to maintain his dicatorial hold on power. The elections were held in February 1986.

  A team of United States observers, which included a joint congressional delegation, issued a mild criticism of electoral abuses, but individual members expressed shock and indignation: Senator Richard Lugar claimed that between 10 and 40 percent of the voters had been disenfranchised by the removal of their names from registration rolls. The results tabulated by the government's Commission on Elections (COMELEC) showed Marcos leading, whereas NAMFREL figures showed a majority for the Aquino-Laurel ticket. On February 9, computer operators at COMELEC observed discrepancies between their figures and those officially announced and walked out in protest, at some risk to their lives.

  A member of Sen. Lugar's monitoring team was then, first term Senator John Kerry. P. J. O'Rourke a reporter for Rollong Stone Magazine picks up the story.

  Most of the Potomac Parakeets were a big disappointment. Massachusetts senator John Kerry was a founding member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but he was a bath toy in this fray.
  
  On Sunday night, two days after the election, thirty of the computer operators from COMELEC [the Philippine government “Commission on Elections,” appointed by Marcos and in charge of compiling the final vote tally] walked off the job, protesting that the vote figures were being juggled. Aquino supporters and NAMFREL volunteers took the operators, most of them young women, to a church, and hundreds of people formed a protective barrier around them. [NAMFREL�"The National Movement for Free Elections�"was supposedly nonpartisan, but NAMFREL members were strongly anti-Marcos.]
  
  Village Voice reporter Joe Conason and I had been tipped off about the walkout, and when we got to the church, we found Bea Zobel, one of Cory Aquino’s top aides, in a tizzy. “The women are terrified,” she said. “They’re scared to go home. They don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to do.” Joe and I suggested that Mrs. Zobel go to the Manila Hotel and bring back some members of the Congressional observer team. She came back with Kerry, who did nothing.
  
  Kerry later said that he didn’t talk to the COMELEC employees then because he wasn’t allowed to. [A bone-head Rolling Stone fact-checker sent the article to Kerry’s Senate office for comment. Kerry staffers were wroth and insisted the senator’s version of events be included.] This is ridiculous. He was ushered into an area that had been cordoned off from the press and the crowd and where the computer operators were sitting. To talk to the women, all he would have had to do was raise his voice. Why he was reluctant, I can’t tell you. I can tell you what any red-blooded representative of the U.S. Government should have done. He should have shouted, “If you’re frightened for your safety, I’ll take you to the American embassy, and damn the man who tries to stop me.” But all Kerry did was walk around like a male model in a concerned and thoughtful pose.

  To be fair Kerry wasn't alone in his failure to shed light on a fraudlent election process. Sen. Lugar told Manila's government-controlled Channel 4, "The only problems I saw were minor and technical." A far different story was told for US consumption:

  By the next morning, Lugar was indignantly telling Tom Brokaw, "It's a very, very suspicious count." But that was not shown on Philippine TV. The members of the U.S. delegation used the words "passionate commitment of the Philippine people to democracy" so often that, shortened to "Pash Commit of Flips to Dem," it became a catch phrase among reporters.

  Anyone notice a pattern here? Kerry had a chance to make a real difference, in fact take the lead. As a first-term Senator of Massachusetts you would expect a more “active response” in defending the democratic process he was just elected to himself. Instead the result was another case of JF[ailure]K, not "reporting for duty.".

• 4 - Marc

  Sep 19, 2004 at 11:27 am

  PS - Here is a little more Cheney leadership for you. Cheney walked away from millions when he made the choice to be VP. According the Halliburton Proxy statement immediately after Cheney left the company:

  Mr. Cheney has entered into an irrevocable agreement to donate to charity the after-tax proceeds from the exercise of all his outstanding vested and unvested stock options, including the options relating to 200,000 shares referenced in the table. The agreement gives an administrative agent total discretion to decide when to exercise the options, without consultation with Mr. Cheney. Mr. Cheney does not own any shares of Common Stock.

  What was the worth of the stock he gave up? A cool $74 million. Such a greedy bastard isn't he?
  
  So what about Kerry? Lets have a look. It looks as though he had a slight problem with the insurance group AIG. Kerry personally interceded on behalf of AIG to short-circuit legislation that would have cost AIG millions of dollars on its involvement in Boston's infamous "Big Dig" operation. USA Today reported that shortly after trying to sidetrack the legislation, AIG contributed thousands of dollars to Kerry's campaign coffers in 2000.
  
  What they failed to report is at the very moment Kerry was lobbying colleagues in Congress not to punish AIG for diverting federal money from the Big Dig project, Kerry's own family owned as much as $1 million in AIG stock, according to Kerry's financial disclosures with the Senate.
  
  Leadership? Well not so its obvious.

• 5 - Hal Pawluk

  Sep 19, 2004 at 12:21 pm

  Cheney still has stock options on 433,000 Halliburton shares.
  
  He definitely has an interest in how well the company does, as that will determine how much he makes on those shares (currently at about $32 each).
  

• 6 - Big Time Patriot

  Sep 19, 2004 at 3:00 pm

  "Pentagon officials have acknowledged that a political appointee was behind the controversial decision to have Halliburton Inc. plan for the postwar recovery of Iraq's oil sector and had informed Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff before finalizing the deal, a Democratic lawmaker said Sunday.
  
  The decision, overruling the advice of an Army lawyer, eventually resulted in the awarding of a $7-billion, no-bid contract to Halliburton, which Cheney ran for five years before he was nominated for vice president."
  
  FROM: "USA: Appointee's Role in Halliburton Pact Told" http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11370
  
  So you think Dick HAD to make a phone call for Halliburton? This wasn't a contract awarded by some faceless military office worker. It was a contract awarded by the Bush "team". I'm sorry they didn't make out a little connect-the-dots map for conservatives to follow, but I hope you can make this HUGE leap from the Vice-President owning stock and receiveing checks from Halliburton WHILE vice-president, to a "Politically appointed" official in the same administration awarding a contract to a company. Yes, Cheney's checks are "deferred payments", but it doesn't pass the smell test, and it speaks to Cheney's priorities that the taxes he saves on the money are more important to him than the respectability of the office of vice-president.
  
  Remember "travelgate"? A few million dollars of potential sleaze were enough to bring conservatives to a froth at that time. But now, what's a few billion dollars of tax payer money anyway?

• 7 - Marc

  Sep 19, 2004 at 9:46 pm

  Smell test? Apparently the Justice Dept has a cold, they as yet haven't smelled any thing of value.
  
  A question. Have you heard of LOGCAP?
  It is the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program created by the United States Army.
  
  Halliburton was awarded this services contract under the Clinton administration. In the 1990s the Army wanted to get outside help handling the logistics associated with actions overseas. That's when the Army came up with LOGCAP, the U.S. Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. Halliburton first won the competitive bid for LOGCAP in 1992. It lost the contract in 1997. Who was president in 1997? Someone named Bill Clinton. Halliburton was out, but Clinton needed help with his logistics efforts in Bosnia. Who did he turn to? Halliburton? He gave another contract to Halliburton with no competitive bidding.
  
  Halliburton then won the competitive bidding process again in 2001.
  
  So .. which party seems to favor Halliburton? In 1992 and in 2001, under Republican presidents, Halliburton wins competitive bids for LOGCAP. In 1997, under a Democratic president, Halliburton gets the contract without a bid.
  
  And I notice no one wanted to touch the fact that Halliburton, despite all the alleged Cheney malfeasance, has lost money since the Iraq war started, or no one smelled (to use your term) the stink rising from the Kerry/AIG connections.
  
  But as long as you guys are using "smell" vice legal proof to condem someone this stinks very badly also:

  John Kerry's family dumped millions of dollars of foreign holdings as he launched his White House bid, gobbling up Made in the USA stocks in a huge politically savvy international-to-domestic shift.
  
  The investments, mostly in the name of Kerry's multimillionaire wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, sold stock in massive overseas players like Heineken, Sony, British Petroleum and Italian Telecom for red, white and blue companies like McDonald's, Dell and Kohls.

  Oh look BP, one of those evil oil empires.
  
  I guess he believed in "outsourcing" his stock portfolio. At least til he knew it wouldn't pass the "smell test."

• 8 - Jim Carruthers

  Sep 19, 2004 at 10:08 pm

  I'm wondering why Marc hasn't linked to the recent Rolling Stone article as a testament to Cheney's character. Of course, I could have blinked and missed it because I was gagging that he brought up the important role the Reagan government (which Cheney wasn't involved in) played in training, financing and arming death squads.
  
  So either you are a disingenuous creep or, hell I don't know what, just being this close to somebody like that just makes me feel like I've stepped in filth. Somewhat like being in the vicinity of Dick Cheney.

• 9 - Marc

  Sep 20, 2004 at 11:38 am

  creep?
  
  Thanks Jim your so kind. Rolling Stone? Well lets see maybe because I haven't read it. Or maybe because I didn't know it was available?
  
  But no it must be just because I am a creep.
  
  And why should I bring up the Reagan Gov. Because you have assumed that I might be a Republican?
  
  You know what they say about assuming something. Now excuse me... While I wipe my feet

• 10 - Jim Carruthers

  Sep 20, 2004 at 5:26 pm

  Marc, the Rolling Stone article would be this one, The Curse of Dick Cheney.
  
  

  
  Once again, however, Cheney did not let reality dissuade him from his course. As the disaster has unfolded in Iraq, he has continued to insist against all evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, that the dictator was aiding Al Qaeda, that nothing the Bush administration has done was a mistake. Those who have known him over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. "He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met," says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney's freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: "If I could ask Dick one question, I'd ask him how he could be so unempathetic."
  
  It's a question Cheney is unlikely ever to answer. Throughout the years, he has sealed himself off from the possibility of such inquiries. The most famous example is his draft evasion during the Vietnam War. He has never candidly discussed his feelings about the war, the traumatic, formative event for American males of his age. Only once, in fact, has he even answered a question as to why he avoided serving.
  
  "I had other priorities," was all he has ever said.
  

• 11 - Jim Carruthers

  Sep 20, 2004 at 5:32 pm

  Oh, and one other thing, my "so kind" says thanks.
  
  For the record, "your" and "you're" are not the same thing, and the fact you don't know that just makes me chuck your D- essay into the discard bin. If you can't even get that correct, then why should I waste my time considering what else you have to type from your party operative crib notes?

• 12 - Marc

  Sep 20, 2004 at 8:46 pm

  Such a child - like a seven year old sticking his tongue out on the playground.
  
  Of course not proof reading an entry
  automaticlly allows you to make that assumtion.
  
  And if it has been discarded into the dustbin why are you wasting so much time in an attempt to counter it?
  Odd that.
  
  After reading the first para of the RS piece, it's plain it may very well be a piece of crap. I'll be back later with a fisking of it.
  

• 13 - Jim Carruthers

  Sep 20, 2004 at 9:05 pm

  Because I hate lies, and liars and people who only seek to feed on others.
  
  And people who can't spell: "assumtion"
  
  

• 14 - Jim Carruthers

  Sep 20, 2004 at 10:49 pm

  What I can't really understand in the States, why are there so many interns willing to do all the heavy propaganda lifting for people who obviously aren't worth it right now, and will only be a stain on your career in the future?
  
  You know if you put "Dick Cheney" on your resume, you would be better off using "Pol Pot" or "Ho Chi Minh" ten years from now.
  

• 15 - Victor Gonzalez

  Sep 20, 2004 at 11:25 pm

  This post is a little wild isn't it? More objectivity and self-control would make the point better... it borders on lunacy now...

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