It's worth noting that "real conservatism" means being pro-life and anti-gay marriage also. But that aside, I'm mostly interested in this column for the writing. Which is pretty damn good. I don't know how he'll hold up after a few years of this. But he isn't Bill Kristol."Real conservatism," in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration's attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss's policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.
This is precisely the sort of conservatism that's ascendant in today's much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party's grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.
As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. In debates with Barack Obama, he would have been as cuttingly effective as he was in his encounters with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in 2000 and 2004 respectively. And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might - might! - have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that's necessary if it hopes to regain power.
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Ross, silky-smooth as ever, wonders if conservatism would have been better if Dick Cheney were the Republican nominee:
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I'm afraid you're making the very optimistic assumption that NY Times will be alive in a few years.
I liked the piece, until this point:
"But the argument isn’t going away. It will be with us as long as the threat of terrorism endures. And where the Bush administration’s interrogation programs are concerned, we’ve heard too much to just “look forward,” as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus."
Nice to see Ross has already come out against actually punishing the people that allowed torture to happen.
Ross still doesn't understand that this has nothing to do with the Democratic Party or partisanship. It isn't the Party's---or Obama's---decision whether or not to prosecute. That authority relies strictly with the Attorney General. And by releasing memos that detail obvious criminal wrongdoing and violation of our international treaty obligations, Obama has essentially compelled the AG to investigate and pursue charge, or simply neglect the duties of his office.
I like Ross' article today, except for the blockquoted portion. Too many on the right and in the mainstream media ignore the independent prerogatives of the AG in order to attack supposed left wing partisanship. Now THAT is intellectual cowardice.
You guys are confusing what's on paper for what is. Politics - or at least public opinion - will most certainly drive any decision to prosecute. Holder is VERY unlikely to engage in any prosecution that his boss doesn't want; and Obama isn't going to push for a prosecution in the face of public/political opposition, or even disinterest.
He's made it clear that the only way he's going to get involved in prosecutions is to be dragged into them, kicking and screaming. He's willing to spend his political capital. Just not on this. In his view, prosecutions and extensive investigations don't offer any "deliverable" that can meaningfully improve the fortunes of Americans, at home or abroad. I'm not sure I agree with him, but I think that's where he is.
There's a risk in assuming that we know everything already: That we know the legal memos were prepared in bad faith; that we know torture never worked; that we know Cheney and Bush masterminded the whole thing.
Yes, it certainly appears that all of these things are true. But Dick Cheney also knew that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 killers.
I read Douthat as thinking along the same lines I am: We absolutely need to investigate this stuff - how it happened, why it really happened, and what effects it had. But engaging in traditional Lewinsky-style prosecutions of the Executive is a pretty bad idea.
DB is right, only Republicans can engage in assholery and come away clean.
It is worth writing bluntly though: In America if you're president, you can torture people to fabricate evidence for a pre-emptive war, but don't go around lying about BJs, because then you'll be in trouble.
It's amazing to me that the bottomline gets lost somehow along the way. I really wonder what the polling would look like in a push poll where one asked "keeping in mind Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about an extra-marital affair, do you think a president/public officials should be investigated if he/they broke the Geneva convention rules against torture to go to war without international approval?" It's a Rovian tactic to some extent, but I think it may be justified to rally public support. Although, I don't know how it would play out, so who knows
I am with you all the way Dan. Where are our values, that a very personal matter becomes public fodder and the overturning of international law is best kept behind closed doors?
Then how exactly can Obama enforce his own ban on torture?? If the CIA or Defense Dept tortures a detainee on his watch, what will he do---prosecute them? If not, then what does his torture ban really mean?
I agree that we need to let all the facts come out, from who was tortured and by what means to the professionalism and (lack of) good faith on the part of the memo authors. But polls already indicate that the electorate favors investigations into the torture regime. Who's to say that once the full scale of criminality is aired that the public won't also be firmly in favor of prosecutions?? We won't really know if it's political suicide to prosecute lawbreakers until all the facts are aired, and I'm willing to wait a few years---provided the Obama team is serious about a truth comission.
Wouldn't a Cheney run violate the 22nd Amendment?
(Slightly) more seriously, it's a very good column for Ross. I don't agree with him all the time, but I'll definitely be more likely to read the column than Kristol's dreck.
Ross says that most Republicans think they lost because they spent too much money on domestic programs.
In my world, Republicans were the ones that you counted on to cut back on the spending, to get rid of the dumb overblown ideas that Democrats had tried but only sort of worked. Bush turned them into the "don't tax, but spend anyway" party. Of course, he was trying to copy Ronald Reagan, who did this by spending on the military.
an example of damning with faint praise if i ever heard one...
Dick Cheney at this point in his career is the least popular face of conservatism. Maybe it would serve conservative ideologues fed up with the failures of the Bush years to have had Dick Cheney run rather than John McCain, but Obama would have shredded him in the debates. The guy has been caught lying so many times, he would have been a wall to wall youtube reel. As far as his skills at being cutting, I still rememeber the sickly grin on his face when Edwards brought up his vote against sanctions on apartheid. If Sarah Palin engaged the antipathy of the left to Obama's advantange, Cheney with his audacity of wolves at the door for-evah mindset would have doubled all that without engendering any of the aw shucks populism that Palin, for all her inanity, was able to enflame.
No, Cheney realized early on and continues to do so that he can work his particular brand of starkly paranoid, patriarchal, where's the bunker, my way or the highway magic from behind the scenes with nitwits like W in the Presidency and bloviating know nothings like Limbaugh and Hannity from the media.
Dick Cheney didn't campaign as Dick Cheney in 2000 or 2004. What makes Douthat think he'd have done so in 2008? In the extremely unlikely case that he had run, I suspect we'd have gotten nonsense about his small-town, Wyoming values of thrift and hardwork, patriotic theatrics, coded religious/lifestyle aspersions about anyone who isn't a conservative white Christian, and endless surrogate attacks. And the media would have let the Republican campaign get away with it.
It has been a long time since a Republican presented himself for national office on anything like the contemporary party's actual governing principles.*
*"Himself" is used deliberately. Sarah Palin is an exceptional case of WYSIWYG.
I was liking the writing style too until he used the word "oft-repeated." You know the guy better than me, but does he really talk that way. I don't think anyone does.