History, the sages tell us, is read backward but lived forward, one day at a time, except for February, which has 28.
What lessons can we learn from this simple, yet profound, idea?
There’s what one could call the lesson of gravity: Try as we might to escape them, there are forces out there far stronger than we are.
There’s the lesson of modesty: What seems so totally important and absolutely central to us at the moment it’s occurring often turns out to be, in the greater scheme of things, no big whoop.
And there’s the lesson of travesty: We should have squashed Dick Cheney when we had the chance.
The year was 2000. The month was July. The soon-to-be-official Republican nominee for president, you’ll recall, was one George Walker Bush, governor of Texas and, by all accounts, a perfectly pleasant fellow. Was he somewhat untutored in the ways of Washington? The infighting and the power grabs?
You could say that. You could also say he was walking around the Nation’s Capital with a sign taped to his back that said, “I’m a tourist — take advantage of me.”
Enter Dick Cheney. Cheney the Calm. Cheney the Wise.
Cheney the Crafty.
George Bush needed to find a running mate, and Dick Cheney had been chosen — who knows how? who knows why? — to help him find one. Dick Cheney, the One-Man Search Committee. A perfectly reasonable arrangement, or so it seemed at the time. After all, Dick Cheney had been around the block a time or two; he knew everyone worth knowing in Republican political circles. Surely he’d help Young George winnow the field.
You bet he would.
He searched high and low, Dick Cheney did, not to mention hither and yon. He compared and he contrasted. He sorted and he sifted. He did everything you’d want a search committee to do. With one exception.
He didn’t take himself out of the running.
And wouldn’t you know it? When Dick Cheney had finished his searching and his sorting and his sifting, when he had compared and contrasted every last resume that passed across his desk, there was only one candidate left standing. One candidate who stood head and shoulders above all the rest.
Dick Cheney found: Dick Cheney.
So why didn’t the alarm bells go off right that minute?
Why didn’t Cheney-chooses-Cheney go from mildly quirky to borderline pathological? Can you think of many other lines of work where the person doing the search and the person found by the search are one and the same? And mind you, this isn’t some Bloatburger franchise we’re talking about, but the loftiest levels of the government of these United States.
Cheney-chooses-Cheney. Shouldn’t it have seemed bizarre?
True, this was long before it became clear that Dick Cheney had an agenda of his own — an agenda, and an assortment of longtime grievances that would rival Clarence Thomas’s. The executive branch had been emasculated after Watergate, Dick Cheney believed. Congress had spent decades interfering with the chief executive’s prerogatives. It was time — long past time, Dick Cheney believed — to restore the awesome powers of the presidency. (And who better to help restore them, and to help a novice leader flex those newfound muscles, than Mr. C. himself?)
We didn’t know then what we know now, but still: Shouldn’t Cheney-chooses-Cheney have seemed … dangerous? Putting that sort of man that close to that much power?
Now we’ve seen the results.
What were we thinking?
Rick Horowitz is a nationally syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is rickhoro@execpc.com.
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