Grandpa Vigilant Vs. Kid Nuance
It went down. Oh yeah, it did. Big time.
The president spoke for a long time in a big room. And then the former vice president spoke for a long time in a smaller room across town. We'll be talking about it for hours, or at least until something else happens. The two men, Grandpa Cheney and Kid Obama, totally disagreed. But we already knew that. What the speeches showed was something different: How differently their minds work. It's as if they were wired with different technology.
Barack the Kid spoke of complexity. Each of his points had several subparts. Even the subparts had subparts. He explained three major decisions he had made. Then he addressed two big topics--the future of Guantanamo detainees, which could be divided into five categories, and his approach to security and transparency, which itself had several subparts ranging from declassification to the use of the states secret privilege in court. Obama wanted to add nuance to the debate over these issues, he said, still acting like a professor at the white board. "I will explain how each action that we are taking will help build a framework that protects both the American people and the values that we hold dear," he said.
Grandpa Vigilant had no time for frameworks with subpoints. In his mind the world was entirely binary: good/bad, effective/ineffective, successful/unsuccessful. The core of Cheney's argument was this claim to a digitized world of 0's and 1's.
[W]e're left to draw one of two conclusions, and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event, coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort.
This is a radical statement, worth reading a second time. It assumes, at its core, that the national security policies of George W. Bush, which the American people have largely judged a failure, are an all or nothing proposition. They cannot be improved, or criticized. They cannot be pieced apart into subgroups or frameworks. To put it simply, You are either with us or against us. Cheney has fashioned himself into the L. Ron Hubbard of foreign policy. To criticize is to reject. Skepticism is not a virtue, but an attack. [More after the jump.]
In this same binary mode, Cheney also called for "a truthful telling of history," something he believes has not occurred over the past several weeks. For instance, he said that the Obama Administration has selectively released memos describing the CIA interrogation program. "For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers," Cheney said. (In the spirit of truthfulness, I am obligated to point out that the 2005 memos Obama released did include extensive discussion of the information obtained through harsh interrogations. The White House is still processing--and has not objected to--the release of the memos Cheney wishes to discuss in public.)
He said that some have made a "strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib with the top-secret program of enhanced interrogations." (Another truthfulness note: As bookshelves of investigations have concluded, the photos at Abu Ghraib captured a variety of things, including officially-approved interrogation practices--using stress positions, dogs, forced nudity, sleep deprivation--as well as the unsupervised abuses of night guards enjoying sadistic acts of humiliation. The one dead guy in the photos, for instance, had been killed in the custody of OGA, an acronym for classified government forces, most likely the CIA. The night guards had nothing to do with his death, which never led to any public reprimands of the officials involved.)
Cheney rejected at face value the "recruitment-tool theory," which posits that information about harsh interrogation methods riles America's enemies and increases the danger abroad. (Final truthfulness note: Cheney and the Bush Administration have long echoed military leaders in arguing that the release of photos, like the abuses at Abu Ghraib, could harm U.S. military interests by rousing anti-American sentiment abroad.)
But never mind the specifics of Cheney's search for a "truthful telling of history." What is important here is that Cheney declared, without any equivocation or nuance, that "in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground." It was less an argument than a declaration. It was a vivid reminder of where he stands, and how he thinks. If nothing else, it is a perfect epitaph for philosophy, and an era of American history that has, at least for the moment, been thoroughly rejected by the sitting President of the United States.
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"If nothing else, it is a perfect epitaph for philosophy, and an era of American history that has, at least for the moment, been thoroughly rejected by the sitting President of the United States."
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Right. Cheney's a fool, an @$$hole, and an anachronism. So stop giving him a podium! -
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Releasing photos could arouse anti-American sentiment abroad? I thought the "Muslins" all hated us anyway and that's why we had to crap on the Constitution in the first place.
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That's a long way to go to prove Cheney's statement wasn't worth reading even once, much less twice. His position has long been the "separate but equal" of the national security realm – long discredited, and immoral from the get-go. The only reason we have to put up with its continued exposure is that media types keep covering it, either as the piñata of the day or as some sort of required "balance" to reality. Enough already.
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The fact is, there's little difference in this "binary" approach from Bush, Rumsfeld and the entire neocon cabal. And some of us (we would be the much-hated DFHs) have been trying to tell you that these people were radicals for quite some time.
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BTW, there were many more than the "one dead guy" resulting from the torture regime. They've just successfully destroyed or covered-up the photographic evidence of their murders. -
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[...] like this makes me smile “Grandpa Vigilant Vs. Kid Nuance” over at TIME’s Swampland, depicting Cheney to be the Andy Rooney of the pro-torture [...]
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Kid Obama? Barack the Kid?
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That's the President of the United States you're talking about, MS. Show some GD respect. -
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Except - there was no vigilance until AFTER 9/11. The reason 9/11 "changed everything" for Bush/Cheney was that they had completely ignored non-state threats previously. And then, in a panic, they threw the kitchen sink at the problem.
Even then, Bush/Cheney couldn't conceive of a war that didn't involve a recognizable opponent. Hence Iraq. If the Redcoats had been available, they'd have fought them.
Worse than the failure of the Bush/Cheney vision is the total lack of reflection and self-awareness that (a) fostered and (b) perpetuated it.
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What an insightful post!
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Just kidding! -
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MS,
Your observations about Cheney's binary vs Obama's heirarchal approach to thinking are of course spot on. What I find more intriguing is the various times where Obama actually held up binary choices as his strawman:
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Joe quotes the relevant paragraph:
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We see that, above all, in how the recent debate has been obscured by two opposite and absolutist ends. On one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and who would almost never put national security over transparency. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: "anything goes." Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants - provided that it is a President with whom they agree.
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Whereas Cheney embraces the binary thinking you note, Obama in contrast holds it up for ridicule (even where it doesn't actually exist)
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I remain curious as to your reaction to this excerpt:
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But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who have received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, commanded Taliban troops in battle, expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.
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While many people might agree that keeping such people locked up might be prudent and appropriate, what possible legal basis can we claim for it? And where do we draw a line between "expressed their allegiance to Osama Bin Laden" and simply "returned fire against the soldiers who were charging their home" or "Sat around a table drinking beer and discussing how much America sucks?"
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Obama is trying to thread a needle here but he's trying to legitimize something for which there is no legally defensible basis. -
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Vigilant? Maybe this word has a different definition in the dictionary you use ("Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."). He's certainly diligent, if by that we both understand it doing everything necessary, including breaking international law, to forge a specious Iraq/Al-Qaeda link that ended up bankrupting our country and getting hundreds of thousands of people killed.
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Someone please tell me why anyone takes Mr. Cheney seriously. This is the same guy who still believes that Al Qaida was in Iraq before the War, even though that theory has been discredited. Now we are supposed to believe that torture yielded "valuable" information. What is the basis? Is the same basis where Mr. Cheney got his information that Al Qaida and Iraq where connected?
Mr Cheney has a disconnect with reality. He can't see that torture elicits false information, information the enemy knows you want to hear. So if you have in your mind a preconceived idea, and you want someone to admit to it, all you have to do is torture them and then they will tell you the "truth".
I wish I could live in the same world as Mr. Cheney which is simply the good guys vs. the bad guys. Unfortuately, the real world does not work like it does in the movies, and guys like Cheney eventually bit the dust.
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Enough is enough. Time for a full on investigation. If Cheney feels he did nothing wrong, it was all completely legal and above board then he can prove it in a court of law.
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Obama is big on finding middle ground, here is my modest proposal.
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The Dems agree to allow the Republicans to torture 10 people a year in the location of their choosing. We'll do our best to make sure they are bad guys, and then deliver them to an Egyptian prison where Cheney and Hannity can prove what big men they are by beating up a guy tied to a chair.
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In exchange, we get GOP support for single-payer health care.
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I don't like the thought of torturing 10 people, but if that is what it takes to get health care for 50+ million US citizen I'll take it. -
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choska: please refer to any episode of the Twilight Zone, Tales From The Crypt, etc, in which a character makes a deal with the devil. It never works out.
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Geez MS--just when I thought Cheney couldn't be more menacing, you had to give the image of a scientologist cheney?
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I wonder what Cheney thinks of colonialism...actually, if you substitute imperialism for that term, then we already know what he thinks, so nevermind. Truly, we are the civilized people fighting the dirty savages then.
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This fossil needs to be reburied. -
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hellsLA(please refer to any episode of the Twilight Zone, Tales From The Crypt, etc, in which a character makes a deal with the devil. It never works out.)
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The classic short story/play/film The Devil and Daniel Webster, but of course there's an empathetic judge involved.
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"Cheney has fashioned himself into the L. Ron Hubbard of foreign policy. To criticize is to reject. Skepticism is not a virtue, but an attack."
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Haha, now that is a good analogy, Scherer. -
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I'm sick of the media giving this American fascist a platform. But given that online news outlets like Time.com rely on click counts to attract revenue, we don't help the cause by reading and then commenting on this crap then returning to follow the action.
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We're as bad as the gossip mongers who patronize the rags at the checkout. Someone can finish the analogy.
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I say we boycott any additional past, present and future stories which has as its principal focus the mad ravings of Richard Strangelove Cheney. I am starting right now. I'll leave it to swamplanders to debate the merits for themselves and join me if fit you see it.
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Maybe we'll start a movement. -
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Is is just me, or can anyone remember another instance where a high-ranking official of a previous administration made such a concerted effort to undermine the current administration? I've tried and tried, but I can't remember a single one. To be honest, I thought it was one of those things that just wasn't done, that respecting the will of the American people precluded such sniping.
Guess it's just one more nicety of life in Washington that Cheney et al decided to crap on on their way out the door.
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MS, great post.
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[W]e're left to draw one of two conclusions, and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event, coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort.
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I am so profoundly sick of the Cheneys. They are fundamentally anti-logic yet they use a veneer of logic, unlike Bush, which apparently qualifies them as Serious Thinkers. -
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hellslittleangel, I was kidding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
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I should have spent less time reading English lit and more time watching television. -
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"But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States."
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Like blowback-deniers? -
23
[...] - Time Swampland [...]
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And to think one of the things I looked forward to the most about Obama winning was getting Cheney off the stage.
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He is malevolent. Can not give up power. Is, one hopes, digging himself a hole he can't get out of, but in the meantime is doing harm to this country.
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MS, your other posts have indicated a grasp of lit-theory 101, so you're aware that any binary inevitably requires some de-con.
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Cheney's either-or is inelegant and, in practice, terrifying, and Obama easily collapsed it. However, Obama's own binary construct is equally misleading, albeit eloquently delivered. Compared to our home-grown Pinochet, of course the president's speech sounds so much more sophisticated and earnest. If he's not Cheney (i.e. evil) then he must be good, right? Dick says there's no middle ground, the pres. says there is, but his false equivalence between the likes of Dick and the dirty left is, how shall I put it, f@cking insulting.
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But it's not surprising that you and Joe will warmly embrace his rhetoric--it's what you're forced to reduce your intellectual capacities to when joining the good-ship MSM. Are the Obama admin's positions/decisions thus far superior to Cheney, is there pull back from the extreme cutting envelope of our previous torture policies, yes. But is merely carving out a politically safe area in the middle of that debate sufficient? If A) Cheneyism is wrong, b/c it's, we can all agree, brutal lunacy, does that automatically mean that C) the middle position as practiced thus far by Obama is correct? Or is at all within the range of possibility that position B) let's call it Greenwaldism, is simply the just and correct position.
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More simplified:
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Boy A thinks rape is OK if the girl is drunk
Boy B thinks rape is never acceptable re: less of the girl's condition
Boy C thinks you should split the diff--that sometimes it's OK, but sometimes not (wiser men than he must decide this complicated ?)
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In the end, here's my fear, that the US will stop torture policies during Obama's presidency, but will continue to outsource the practice, to Bagram et al. And, as always, a little historical context is always helpful.
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The SOA (US Army School of the Americas) did some rather nasty things in Latin America, I'm sure you're aware. "Among the SOA's 60,000 graduates are former dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia." Bear in mind that these men brutalized their populations under dem & repub US presidents alike (our tax $ paid for their practices).
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From Scotland's Sunday Herald:
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1212-02.htm
- michaelscherer Ah.... Richard Wolffe. - 3 hours ago
- michaelscherer AP Fact Checks Obama's speech: http://bit.ly/5OR9ph - 3 hours ago
- michaelscherer RT @AlexKoppelman: "I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again." Obama joining 9/12 Project! - 3 hours ago
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