american crisis 2: cheney's moral blackmail

Dear President Bush,

Yesterday you said, "I vowed to the American people I would do everything I could to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I'm not going to forget them.”

Good for you. I’m not going to forget September 11th, either.

In my last letter I discussed your aversion to reading. Well, my topic seems to have coincided by happy chance with Ron Suskind’s new book. The book reveals, among other things, your less than stellar habits in the matter of information retrieval. According to Suskind, you have created a political tactic out of your feigned illiteracy: plausibly claiming ignorance, for instance, about the brummagem nature of your assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weaponry. After all, you just didn't read that piece of paper when it came across your desk. You trusted what Dick told you.

However, let's remember the lessons of 9/11. Suskind's book, according to reports of it in the press – see the section in the ps to this letter that I am citing from Brad Delong’s site – throws even more light on what happened between 8/6/01 and 9/11. The more light that is cast, the more disturbing your actions appear. Much more disturbing than they appeared even in Michael Moore's movie, or in any number of conspiratorial accounts of 9/11. In all of those accounts, you are assumed to be more than competent. Your mission accomplished persona is simply morally reversed -- from superhero to supervillain.

But the truth is otherwise, isn't it? In fact, you have no idea what to do in an emergency. I have often why nobody has ever pressed you about what you did in that month. We knew, before Suskind, that you had been told about Al Qaeda intentions to attack the U.S. We still don't know if, for instance, you pressed the FBI director, alerted the Secretary of Transportation, etc. Now we do know a bit more, and that glimpse looks bad. Just as happened before Katerina, you took it to be your role to play observer -- and a disinterested, dumb observer at that. According to Suskind, your almost incomprehensible indolence during that summer was interrupted not by reports you had asked for, but by the CIA thrusting an assessment upon you, disturbing the great work of brush clearing on your ranch. You were clearly more interested in the brush clearing. At that time, apparently, you considered the presidency a part time job – much like being the Governor of Texas, or being a teenage liquor mixer at your Dad’s country club.

Suskind’s discovery has given us another piece of the mystery that has long troubled LI – namely, Cheney’s role in your administration. It has become a given among the press that Cheney’s power is due to your inexperience. This, I think, is incorrect. There is nothing in your character that would indicate that you are capable of the kind of cool self-assessment this story implies – to wit, deciding that you are inexperienced, and handing power to Cheney. Nothing in your actions pre-9/11 make this plausible. Cheney, in those halcyon days, was given the task of mind melding with his fellow extraterrestrial energy company CEOs. He was not the man behind the throne.

Instead, I have an alternative narrative. Please tell me if this is correct. In the weeks following 9/11, you had a big secret – your neglect of all warnings that this was about to happen. At the time that you were most conscious of this secret, your VP began to press his own agenda, and his own desire to take over foreign policymaking from you. Or at least operate as the chief shaper of that policy. I have always suspected that the timing of those two things is not a coincidence. In effect, the person who knew about your negligence, who made it his duty to know, was your Vice President. And this Vice President is extraordinarily unscrupulous. If we turned to the pseudo-science of criminal profiling, I think we could show, pretty easily, that he is a socio-path.

LI thinks that this period was a time of moral blackmail. My hypothesis depends on two things: your guilt and your secret. There are those who think that you, like Cheney, are a socio-path – I don’t think so, however, I think you are prey to two polar moods – one of supreme vanity, and the other of guilt. The latter, of course, being the product of your mother’s upbringing. As a good Freudian, I consider that your Jesus Christ obsession is not just for political show, but a way of mediating between these two contradictory traits. As a reward for your abasement, you are made a son of God yourself. This is almost perfect as a solution to your little psychic woes. But surely on 9/11, a day you spent flying around, as though looking for another country to be president of, all the past failures must have come bubbling up – that pre-spree feeling. The failure to be a fighter pilot, like Daddy. The failure to be an oil company founder, like Daddy. The need for Daddy to get you on Harkin, and your eagerness to profit to the point where Daddy’s friends had to squelch an embarrassing investigation. You were vulnerable as you had never been, since past fuck ups were, after all, country club affairs. So you stole from Harkin and dropped out of the National Guard. Really, these weren’t big deals. But this time, it was a big deal.

The presidential bios of dead presidents often fill us in on things that we didn’t know at the time – notably, who the president was fucking. In your case, we will find out something different – who was fucking the president.

It was during this period that an inexplicable grant of authority was given to your Vice President. I am not saying that the Vice President went into your office and laid all his cards out on the table – although he might have. This is a crude man. I am saying that the emotional pre-requisites for emotional and political blackmail were there; that out of your consciousness of failure, you ceded power you would not otherwise have ceded to Cheney; and that your inability to free yourself from him stems from these crucial weeks.

Any other president would, at the very least, have been angry that his vice president went to see his mistress on a Texas ranch and ended up shooting a friend (a friend of your family) in the face and leaving your people to clean up the P.R. mess. But you weren’t. This blackmail has now become not just a single thread in your administration – it is the whole spider web.

Of course, my story shouldn’t be taken to suggest that you aren’t on board for such crimes as the invasion of Iraq – it is just that, on your own, I don’t think you would have had the courage or the interest to drive that enterprise. When, on your own, you do attempt to drive an enterprise – cast your mind back to ‘reforming’ social security – the enterprise peters out. You are not what I’d call a transformational leader, to use management speak. You are rather a rare case of transformational/patsy leadership.

And, of course, your guilt about 9/11 is not enough. If we only had known then, what we know now, surely you would not only have been impeached – you might have been imprisoned. You must be grateful, on some level, to Cheney for his role in creating such an unparalleled atmosphere of bullying that the facts of your non-role, pre 9/11, have never become a real issue. Who has ever asked about it? The same press that went into ecstasy about a sperm stained dress, years ago, has an incredible disinterest in what, exactly, you did, post August 6. I assume that is because the press feels threatened itself, for reasons I am not going to go into, here. However, the success of Cheney’s socio-pathic demeanor, the spread of his combination of guilt free lying and absurd truculence, has spread like a meme through the right wing media-sphere. Joe McCarthy has been normalized in the last six years.

This doesn’t answer all of the questions about 9/11, by any means. The collapse of the Democratic party – the abdication of the oppositional role – is not explained by Cheney-ian moral blackmail. I think there are structural explanations for that. There is a notion, on the part of grassroots Democrats, that the party is supposed to win elections. But the party doesn’t really exist to do any such thing for the party’s leading spirits in D.C. – rather, it exists as a form of entrée into the power structure. If winning elections threatens that power structure, it threatens those leading spirits. Consequently, they will take the knife to any oppositional strategy that leads to threats on their own entrenched positions. It is extremely odd that a party that held the White House for eight years would simply surrender as it did, but it is surely less odd if that party, for a long time, had become a vehicle for self-aggrandizement of a selected group in the Court society of D.C.

Yours sincerely,
Limited Inc.

PS – From Suskind’s book:

Ron Suskind: The "what ifs" can kill you.... [I]n terms of the tragedy of 9/11, a particular regret lingers for those who might have made a difference. The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to [Bush]--"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"--has been widely noted in the past few years. But also in August CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President--to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.
The analytical arm of CIA was in a kind of panic mode.... They didn't know place or time... but something was coming. The President needed to know.
Verbal briefings of George W. Bush are acts of almost inestimable import... more so than... for other recent presidents. He's not much of a reader... never has been... not a President who sees much value in hearing from a wide array of voices.... But he's a very good listener and an extremely visual listener. He sizes people up swiftly and aptly... and trusts his eyes. It is a gift, this nonverbal acuity.... What does George W. Bush do? He makes it personal.... The expert... has done the hard work... [Bush] tries to gauge how "certain" they are of what they say....
The trap, of course, is that while these tactile, visceral markers can be crucial... they sometimes are not. The thing to focus on, at certain moments, is what someone says, not who is saying it, or how they're saying it.
And, at an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing during this urgent summer, George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice.
He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer.

"All right," he said. "You've covered your ass, now."