Game On

Sunday, February 14 – Valentine’s Day was right where it should be. This is the holiday all guys dread, the one day when you’re supposed to be all open and emotionally direct, and not the strong silent type impatient with sentiment and fluff and such nonsense. And that’s painful. You have to reveal your inner feelings – it’s required, if you have any – and profess you’re giddy but undying and quite sincere love. But it’s one day a year. It’s always hard to manage the transition from what you consider appropriate male behavior – something between John Wayne (it don’t hurt none, ma’am) and James Bond (cool, on top of everything and suavely cynical and deadly) – to being, for a few hours of one arbitrary day in February, the over-the-top guy with the roses and the love poem he wrote all by himself. And you know you’re in big trouble if you can’t manage it. It’s kind of a test. And guys, she’s keeping score. The slightly wilted flowers from the supermarket, with the clear cellophane and the price tag that you forget to notice still there, and the slightly humorous card you picked up at the corner drug store, will not do. Go that route and she’ll smile wanly, and never forget, or forgive. You’ll pay for that. It’s always a tricky business.

Luckily it was impossible to be distracted on Valentine’s Day, through a fluke of the calendar. The world of sports, where men hide from the girly stuff, was in a dead zone – the Super Bowl had been the week before, and the NBA had paused for the All Star Game – on Valentine’s Day itself, but luckily that game mattered to no one at all – and the NHL was about to pause for its All Star break, and it would be a month before college basketball got down to that March Madness stuff. There were no distractions, save for the fey Winter Olympics with that shuffleboard-on-ice-with-brooms curling stuff and figure skating and ice dancing and ski jumping and such. Women watch such things. Save for the hockey games, no one was smashing anyone else’s face or any of the good stuff. If you wanted to grab a beer and some chips and retreat into the televised world of minimally-controlled highly-skilled macho violence, well, the pickings were slim. If you’re going to have a Valentine’s Day, it might as well fall on the date it did. Maybe that’s on purpose, a subtle cultural conspiracy for focus men on the task at hand.

But all was not lost. There was one macho man on television Valentine’s Day, glowering and insisting on the righteousness of inflicting pain on others to get the job done, to win it all. But it wasn’t a sports hero. It was the former vice president, Dick Cheney. And this Valentine’s Day was the grudge match, with the current vice president, Joe Biden, going head to head with Cheney. And it was a grudge match that began with Biden on NBC, moved to ABC’s This Week with Cheney and ended with Biden appearing live on CBS’s Face the Nation. In the absence of hormonally-enhanced mutants smashing into each other, in the paint or on the gridiron, it would have to do. You have to take your manly confrontation where you can find it.

The AP’s Steven Hurst summarizes it this way:

Pingponging across the airwaves, Vice President Joe Biden and predecessor Dick Cheney bickered Sunday over terror trials and interrogations, credit for success in Iraq and the long-running effort to contain Iran’s nuclear program.

Biden called Cheney “misinformed or he is misinforming” on current national security strategies. Cheney said President Barack Obama wasn’t taking the al-Qaida threat seriously.

But it seems that Cheney “acknowledged that the Bush White House struggled with how to bring suspected terrorists to justice” – he was the only manly man in the former administration, and sometimes got voted down by the girly men who wanted to follow the rules set by treaty and law and Supreme Court rulings, or who were too afraid they get in trouble for torture and other war crimes. He kind of admitted the Bush administration had its share of wimps and cowards back in the day, and he didn’t think much of them either.

But this was sequential, and Biden struck first – Cheney’s attacks on Obama’s commitment to fighting terrorism ignored the obvious facts, and sometimes you don’t want a brutal small-face linebacker when a lithe skills player can do a better job:

“We’ve eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates,” said Biden. “They are in fact not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past. They are on the run. I don’t know where Dick Cheney has been. Look – it’s one thing, again, to criticize. It’s another thing to sort of rewrite history. What is he talking about?”

Cheney had no answer to that, so he changed the subject, saying that Biden was “dead wrong” to assert that a fresh 9/11 strike was unlikely – after all, a nuclear or biological attack by al-Qaida is “the biggest strategic threat the United States faces today.” So there!

But on Cheney’s battering of the Obama administration, Biden said “his assertions are not accurate.” And that was the point. And again there was shift:

Cheney demurred on that allegation, choosing instead to take on again Obama’s decision to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In doing so, he admitted for a second time that he had been at odds with the majority of Bush administration officials on the decision to release prisoners from the military lockup to their home country when cases against them were determined to be legally untenable.

“I didn’t think that releasing anybody was the right thing to do, unless you had evidence that, you know, there was a mistake of some kind,” Cheney said.

And implicit in that, of course, was the idea that our military prison at Guantanamo Bay sends just the right message to the world. Perhaps it’s like the fear factor in football that gives you the advantage – when the guy on the other side of the line says he’ll take your head off, and actually might do that, you call a quick screen pass so he never gets the chance, even if it only gets you two yards and you end up punting the ball away. It’s the same sort of theory.

But Cheney did say that on Afghanistan, and Obama’s decision to increase our forces in that war, in its eighth year, he did have to give Obama high marks. Obama was bringing on the pain, as they say in football – he likes that sort of thing, even if Biden wasn’t being fair. Biden really shouldn’t be giving the Obama administration credit for winding down the war in Iraq without acknowledging the work of President Bush. On the other hand, Biden had said this – “We built on the positive things that the Bush administration had initiated. And we have jettisoned those things that were negative.” Cheney was not mollified – “For them to try to take credit for what happened in Iraq is a little strange. It ought to go with a healthy dose of ‘thank you, George Bush.'” Yeah, well, whatever.

And Hurst notes the other issues:

Biden acknowledged that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed Sept. 11 attack planner, still might face trial in a military tribunal, despite the administration’s earlier decision to take him before a civilian federal court in New York. That now seems unlikely given hot opposition from city authorities and members of Congress. Cheney said he believed Mohammed should and eventually would be tried by the military at a military facility.

Cheney advised the Obama administration against ruling out a military attack on Iran even as it works for a new set of United Nations sanctions. “I don’t think you want to eliminate the military – the possibility of military action. I think that’s essential to give any kind of meaning at all to negotiations over sanctions,” he said.

But on Face the Nation, Biden got in the last word:

“Thank God the last administration didn’t listen to him in the end” on how to handle terrorism suspects. Declaring that Obama was acting on the precedents set in the Bush White House, Biden said of Cheney, “His fight seems to be with the last administration.”

Well, it wasn’t the Super Bowl, but it would have to do.

And as for what this was all about, at Politico, Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei had offered a pre-game analysis:

Cheney’s ability to influence policy – as opposed to influencing cable-news programming – may be dulled by his insensitivity to timing and penchant for rhetorical bombast, with such quotes as describing Obama as “a guy without much experience, who campaigned against much of what we put in place … and who now travels around the world apologizing.” …

“Listening to former Vice President Cheney attack President Obama’s strategic failures in the war on terror feels a little surreal; even from Cheney’s point of view, the Bush administration’s record was at best a very mixed bag,” responded Walter Russell Mead, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in POLITICO’S “Arena” forum.

Several weeks earlier, after Cheney accused Obama of “dithering” during his review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Sen. Dick Lugar, an Indiana Republican with major influence on foreign policy, told Bloomberg TV that Cheney was being “unfair.”

Another Republican, former Rep. Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, defended Obama’s approach to POLITICO and said, “Cheney was wrong – and outrageously so – to so cavalierly dismiss public opinion” in managing war policy when he was in power.

Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University, was more succinct: “Have you, at long last, no shred of decency left? Oh, never mind. Silly question.”

One of the parties here was a bit crazy, and Politico generally leans pro-Republican right. But they seem to see this game as one where the guys who lost are blustering, and pretending they didn’t lose. Payton Manning wouldn’t do this. Why would Cheney?

And Andrew Sullivan, noting this Politico quotes him and implies he seems to think that the origin of Cheney’s somewhat outrageous behavior is psychological, says they’ve pegged him wrong:

I don’t believe that. I believe it is very rational, an attempt to wrest the narrative away from the truth that he authorized horrifying war crimes, that he is criminally liable for them and will be described in history as the vice-president who made the US a symbol for torture throughout the world.

And Sullivan posts a reader comment:

While I agree with your assessment that the former vice president is engaged in a desperate strategy to cover up (and avoid the consequences of) his own official misconduct in authorizing torture, I also believe that he (and the GOP in general) are engaged in a crude political calculation – that since the odds favor another terrorist attack within our borders, they are willing to play those odds by preemptively blaming Obama and the Democrats. There is, bluntly, a level at which they see the potential for mass loss of life and destruction of property as a political “plus.” …

People who regard this kind of speculation as outrageous and unseemly fail to understand that Cheney and his supporters – having already not only rationalized but celebrated torture and the weakening of the constitution in the name of national defense – have crossed a bright line into truly Strangelovian territory. These people are shameless; it is virtually impossible to malign them, it is simply that the truth itself is so malignant we can hardly bear to give it credence.

And on the other side, as shown in the clip from NBC’s Meet the Press, we have something like normal life:

DAVID GREGORY: Let me ask you about some of the criticism that’s been leveled at this Administration by former Vice President Dick Cheney. He has argued that this Administration has failed to treat the fight against terrorists as war. He cites the decision related to Khalid Sheik Muhammad to offer him a civilian trail as one example. Giving the Christmas Day Bomber the privileges of the American criminal justice system is another example. The decision to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison. What do you say?

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Let me choose my words carefully here. Dick Cheney’s a fine fellow. He’s entitled to his own opinion. He’s not entitled to rewrite history. He’s not entitled to his own facts. The Christmas Day Bomber was treated the exact way that he suggested that the Shoe Bomber was treated. Absolutely the same way. Under the Bush Administration there were three trials in military courts. Two of those people are now walking the streets. They are free.

There were 300 trials of so-called terrorists and those who engage in terror against the United States of America who are in federal prison and have not seen the light of day. Prosecuted under the last Administration. Dick Cheney’s a fine fellow, but he is not entitled to rewrite history without it being challenged. I don’t know where he has been. Where was he the last four years of the last Administration?

And Biden explains how a skills player, accused of not even saying we’re at war, gets things done:

I don’t think the Vice – the Former Vice President Dick Cheney listens. The President of the United States said in the State of the Union, “We’re at war with Al Qaeda.” He stated this – and by the way, we’re pursuing that war with a vigor like it’s never been seen before. We’ve eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates. We are making, we’ve sent them underground. They are in fact not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past. They are on the run.

And as for Cheney’s motive, Biden won’t even go there:

I’m not gonna guess about his motive. All I know is he’s factually, substantively wrong. On the major criticisms he is asserting. Why he’s insisting on that? He either is misinformed or he is misinforming. But the facts are that his assertions are not accurate…

And I – I guess – again, I – it’s almost like Dick is trying to rewrite history. I can understand where the – why that would be – you know, an impulse. And maybe he isn’t – literally, I’m not being facetious. Maybe he’s not fully informed of what’s going on. I mean the progress we have made. There has never been as much emphasis and resources brought against Al Qaeda. The success rate exceeds anything that occurred in the last Administration. And they did their best. I’m not – I’m not impugning their effort. It’s simply not true that the President of the United States is not prosecuting the war against Al Qaeda with a vigor that’s never been seen before. It’s real. It’s deep. It’s successful.

But there’s this clip from ABC’s This Week with Jonathan Karl where they show Cheney a clip of Biden saying this:

The idea of there being a massive attack in the United States like 9/11 is unlikely, in my view. But if you see what’s happening, particularly with Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, they have decided to move in a direction of much more small-bore, but devastatingly frightening attacks.

And Cheney doesn’t buy it:

KARL: Is he right?

CHENEY: I don’t think so. And I would point to a study that was released just within the last week or two up at the Kennedy School at Harvard by a gentleman – Mowatt-Larssen’s his name, I believe. He was CIA for 23 years, director of intelligence at the Energy Department for a long time, that looks at this whole question of weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaida and comes to the conclusion that there’s a very high threat that Al Qaida is trying very hard to acquire a weapon of mass destruction and, if they’re successful in acquiring it, that they will use it.

I think he’s right. I think, in fact, the situation with respect to Al Qaida to say that, you know, that was a big attack we had on 9/11, but it’s not likely again, I just think that’s dead wrong. I think the biggest strategic threat the United States faces today is the possibility of another 9/11 with a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind, and I think Al Qaida is out there even as we meet trying to figure out how to do that.

KARL: And do you think that the Obama administration is taking enough serious steps to prevent that?

You know his answer. No.

And there’s also this, Cheney saying that waterboarding should have been an option for the underpants bomber – that should have been an option for the failed Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. You see, “you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table.” And Cheney went on to say he opposed the Bush administration’s ban on waterboarding – they were just wimps. “I was a big supporter of the enhanced techniques,” is what he said.

And John Amato comments:

Cheney basically helped create torture for the Bush administration… Why is Cheney back on TV anyway? Oh, to try and justify his war crimes. And for the media, that was an opinion since he hasn’t been charged with one. And the media continues to let him make his case for torture.

And he squirms when the name Richard Reid is brought up because he has no answer for what the Bush/Cheney did on the shoe bomber case. They had three months to figure out what to do with Reid and Cheney says they didn’t have enough time to get it together. He also passes the buck when Karl cornered him over not putting Reid into military custody.

That might explain this – “A Washington Post poll released last week found that 56 percent approve of the way the president handles the threat of terrorism, making it Obama’s strongest core issue.” That’ll make Cheney squirm, that and the war crimes stuff.

And Steve Benen makes an interesting observation:

For every far-right Republican that tells the Obama administration, “I can’t believe you’re Mirandizing terrorist suspects, trying them in federal courts, imprisoning them on American soil, and closing Gitmo,” the administration responds, “Bush/Cheney Mirandized terrorist suspects, tried them in federal courts, imprisoned them on American soil, and supported closing Gitmo … and you never said a word.”

So, as Greg Sargent note, all Cheney could do was say he disagreed with his own administration:

Indeed, Cheney even acknowledged that his administration could have tried Richard Reid in a military court, but chose to go the civilian route.

That’s not all. When confronted with a Bush-era Justice Department document praising civilian courts as an effective weapon against terror, Cheney acknowledged that some in the administration saw things this way. “We didn’t all agree with that,” Cheney said, acknowledging that there was a “major shootout” inside the administration over the merits of civilian trials.

This, again, is a clear acknowledgment that many Bushies endorsed the current Obama approach.

Benen suggests where that leads:

What an odd dynamic. The debate pits two groups – one is led by President Obama, whose judgment has been endorsed by the military establishment, the intelligence establishment, policy experts, and is in keeping with the practices of all modern presidential administrations. The other group is led by Dick Cheney, neocons, congressional Republicans, Joe Lieberman, and a little too much of the media establishment.

But the bottom line remains the same: as far as Cheney is concerned, Bush and his team were too liberal when it came to national security. That’s seems crazy, but that’s his argument and he’s sticking to it.

But maybe Digby puts it best:

It’s interesting that Cheney and his friends so ruined the economy that people are now wistful about those glory days of terrorism fever and are ready to lash out at any enemy they can find, thus re-opening the door to his very special brand of sadism. It’s an unusual way to rebuild your reputation, but it could work. After all, neocon zombies never die, they just lie in wait.

And Steve Clemons points out others can take advantage of the remaining neocon zombies:

Several years ago, I met with the Deputy Director of the Policy Planning staff of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I asked him what he was working on – and what China’s grand strategy was.

His reply: “We are trying to figure out how to keep you Americans distracted in small Middle Eastern countries.”

Maybe Cheney is working for the Chinese? No, probably not. But what was he doing on television on Valentine’s Day, glowering and insisting on the righteousness of inflicting pain on others to get the job done, to win it all? Perhaps it was counter programming, for the guys anxious about the day, and itching for some real man stuff on a day when there was little of that to be had. That must be it.