Ethics

Cheney's Self-Serving Logic

By Ed Brayton

Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent article at Slate about Dick Cheney's farewell tour of interviews and the conveniently self-serving logic he is using to defend the actions of the Bush administration on a number of fronts. I think she strikes the perfect tone of incredulity:

In an ever-escalating game of chicken between the executive branch and the rest of the world, Vice President Dick Cheney wants you to understand that he has done nothing wrong over the past eight years. In fact, to hear him tell it to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday yesterday, we are all safer for his infallibility in the face of our own complacency. His liberal critics, for their part, answer Cheney's moral certainty by continuing to vigorously debate all the reasons to let him off the hook. What other possible response can there be to all that bristling manliness? History will remember Dick Cheney as the man who managed to make President George W. Bush look like a wimp.

One hesitates to waste too much time deconstructing Cheney's last-minute debater's tricks. The threats and insults stopped being impressive a long time ago. But the vice president's greatest rhetorical sleight of hand may be that he has completely inverted settled and open legal questions. As he snarks his way through his final exit interviews, he takes the position that the thorniest legal questions are the easy ones and the settled ones are still open.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 31, 2008 (boomark / email).