No Honor Among Thieves

This is pretty hilarious stuff, the news that Dick Cheney is starting to bad-mouth W about Bush "going soft" and paying attention to irrelevancies like "public opinion" and the sentiments of the American people during his second term. Dick was always the True Believer: a thoroughly corrupt and manipulative schemer who used his office to enrich Halliburton and KBR, who disregarded any law he found inconvenient, who walked roughshod over the Constitution. It took quite a while for Bush, never that intellectually quick, to realize how much he had been pushed around by Cheney. The wars, the Unitary Executive, the high crimes, the treason of disclosing a CIA operative's identity, the war profiteering. Cheney always figured he could play his ultimate trump card at the end and assure himself and his henchmen of a Presidential pardon that would leave them free to enjoy their wealthy retirement beyond the reach of the law.

The W went wobbly on him. Bush's failure to grant a full pardon to Scooter Libby (as opposed to the commutation of sentence) meant that Libby remained a convicted felon, disbarred, his civil rights impaired. To Cheney that was a bad sign. Bush was beginning to talk against the Family. Then Bush started rambling on a lot about the "judgment of history," his legacy, his library, his freedom agenda. Cheney must have thought: WTF? Who is this guy?

So it must have come as no surprise to Cheney, but a rude moment nonetheless, when Bush decided against what I called the pardon pas-de-deux, where Bush would pardon Cheney, resign, and accept Cheney's pardon in turn. It had the elegance, the outrageousness, the contempt for public opinion that Cheney prized above everything. And Bush wouldn't do it. So Cheney, who knows that bum ticker in his chest could tock for the last time at any moment and has the recklessness such a condition begets, began a program of telling anyone who would listen that Bush himself authorized the torture regime, that he was in on the ground floor. It was almost like listening to Sammy The Bull on the witness stand, taking the Mob down with him.

Which brings up an interesting misconception. Indoctrinated as we are with "Godfather" myths, a lot of us operate on the assumption that mobsters conduct themselves with some sort of courtly honor, high integrity and a somewhat admirable philosophy of simply doing what's necessary - the other side of the street from the power structure, which, in their self-serving view, is just as corrupt. It makes good fiction. But if you've ever read any of the many accounts about actual life in the actual Mob, it becomes apparent that the personalities, of course, are really detestable scumbags - sociopaths, characterological misfits, liars, betrayers without any sense of personal loyalty, who (when the FBI listens in on wiretaps) talk about other mafiosi in the most profane, gossipy, disloyal way imaginable. I mean, how could it be otherwise? These are people who routinely use violence and the threat of violence to get what they want, who have no respect for organized society, who look with contempt on the honest strivings of decent people and see them as suckers. Public enemies.

And so we find out now, as we were bound to find out, that Bush & Cheney also detested each other. I'm inclined to think that W was more the dupe and Cheney more the master, but there wasn't a whole lot to choose between the two. They were both hugely and proudly indifferent of all the suffering they caused, too cynical even to count the civilian dead in Iraq or to assess the effects of the endless deployments to war zones required of the soldiers unfortunately trapped under their command. Fighting utterly useless wars concocted solely for BushCo aggrandizement. They paid no attention as the nation's economy went down the crapper, then mortgaged the country's future while they got out of town before the roof fell in, leaving America a smoking ruin.

And now Cheney turns on Bush. Almost too good to be true.