Cheney/Obama

Confronted with the titanic failure of the Obama administration to live up to a single one of his progressive supporters' more or less fervent dreams, our Progressive cuts open the steaming belly of Dick Cheney and offers it as shelter: Well, would you rather still be living in there? I always say that I find Cheney preferable. I don't deny the reality of his secretiveness, his evident disdain for what good-government types call "transparency," but I propose that even a cursory examination of his character, his habits of speech, his patterns of thought as they emerged over the years, show that his commitment to the practices of secrecy are superficial compared to his deeper and more discomfiting trait of frankness. He was a blunt, misanthropic curmudgeon of a man, he kept his cards close and his subversions of the constitutional order closer, and yet it seems to me that he was and has been forthright about his luciferian principles when asked. Indeed, he famously put them right in the open at the very outset of our supposed post-9/11 era when he said quite plainly that we must tread on the dark side. I am not absolving him of prevarication. Like all politicians, he lied and dissembled. He wasn't above telling tales, and he certainly hated specifics the way all humanity hated the dentist before the advent of laughing gas. But Cheney, as a matter of character, was always willing to tell you that the dress made you look fat. If not entirely above flattering America with lies about its inherent nobility, he was markedly less prone to such nonsense than most pols, and when one regards his eight viceroyal years, what emerges, perhaps surprisingly, is far less the portrait of a blinkered neocon hoping for democracy to bloom in the desert than a man whose American exceptionalism is heterodox--is, at last, an understanding that we are an empire or hegemon and that preserving the prerogatives of such primacy require brutality.

Also he was unpopular, deeply so, whereas Obama maintains a deep reservoir of good will and a legion of loyal defenders despite clearly pursuing the same practical path. Obama is certainly more charming than Dick Cheney, but his rhetorical openness is the superficial dressing behind which lurks a much more opaque character. It doesn't require embracing some birth-certificate paranoia to ask, who is Obama?--not to ask: where did he come from, what is his citizenship, who are his secret masters?; instead, to ask: what does he believe, what are his governing principles? And that, I think, is a trickier question. Well, in the first place, I think that his American exceptionalism is orthodox. He believes the cant. He thinks this is the greatest country in the world, the greatest force for good in history as he himself once put it, although he is plainly willing to go far, far into the supposedly forsworn territory of evil Cheney in pursuit of . . . global freedom? What? Since taking office, he has ratified the policies of domestic surveillance that supposedly marked his predecessors as uniquely intrusive, has continued their policies of detention, has expanded a war, has reaffirmed rendition, i.e. kidnapping, is building a bigger, better concentration camp at Bagram, etc. etc. Practically speaking, he is at least Cheney's equal, with two exceptions. One: he is the president. Two: he is immensely popular.

Many liberals and progressives and suchlike will tell you, and not without some reason, that they oppose these policies now as they did before, that they condemn them in this administration as they did in the last. But it takes no special powers of discernment to see that their hearts aren't in it, that the frequency and fervor of their criticism is greatly diminished, that the prospect of some or other bullshit, half-assed, health-insurance subsidy causes them to pull their punches, and that their temperamental preference for Obama is a fine substitute in their minds for substantive improvement. When they begin suggesting that he be impeached, as they yowled about Cheney, I will take them more seriously in their complaints that I and others like me target them unfairly. They remain "supporters" of this president. Well, why does he need, and why does he deserve anybody's support?