Dick Cheney: Conservative of the Year?

by Scott H. Payne

So says John Bolton over at Human Events,

How is it, therefore, that someone who has no political ambitions can cause so much angst at the White House and in the mainstream news media? The irrefutable answer is that what Cheney is saying, primarily on foreign policy, defense and anti-terrorism, makes sense to more and more American citizens growing increasingly worried by the Obama Administration’s insouciance when U.S. national interests are threatened, both at home and abroad. Since the only real, long-term way to deal with persuasive positions on substantive policy matters is to refute them with sounder policy arguments, it is not hard to understand why the Obama White House is near panic. Where are they going to go to find a better policy inside his administration?

That’s the same Dick Cheney who was instrumental in getting the US into the disaster that is the Iraq war, failed to offer any meaningful strategy for seven years in Afghanistan, and has successfully devolved the country’s moral centre of gravity towards something approaching “depraved warlord” by unrepentantly beating the torture apologia drum, yes?

Okay, just checking. Here’s hoping Human Events is just having its version of a “Slate moment.”

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Tags | Conservative of the Year, dick cheney, human events, John Bolton

8 comments

1 Justin_Anderson { 12.21.09 at 11:41 am }

Dick Cheney is the face of modern conservatism. He and the other neocon hawks hijacked it after 9-11 and used it as a vehicle for their own authoritarian fantasies. The question remains, who gets to define what conservative means. Is it the intellectual right or the mouthbreathers at Fox, talk radio, RedState, etc.

2 Dem { 12.21.09 at 6:25 pm }

As an honest question: At what point does someone go right enough to become a reactionary? What would be the difference between a conservative (in this case “face of modern conservatism” encapsulated in Palin or Cheney) vs. a reactionary?

Jaybird
December 21st, 2009 at 9:12 pm

Is it something you become?

I’ve always seen it as something that you stay while everything else changes around you. I mean, those people who argue that we shouldn’t have gay marriage are eventually going to be reactionary… but they were centrists a mere decade ago and it wasn’t even a topic a decade before that.

Dem
December 21st, 2009 at 9:42 pm

I’ve always seen it as one who believes you should “turn back the clock,” so close enough in some ways to your view. I just never see the terminology used very often (comparative to the term “radical” that is used).

Katherine
December 28th, 2009 at 1:15 pm

Conservative is someone who wants things to stay the same. Reactionary is someone seeking to reverse the course of history.

The Republican Party crossed that line with Reagan.

Katherine
December 28th, 2009 at 1:29 pm

To elaborate: the status quo pre-Reagan was a system that attempted to undo economic inequities via progressive taxation. Reagan sought (and succeeded) to reverse that to make government work to the benefit of the rich. He sought to undo the social safety net.

In the Cold War, the status quo was contained. Reagan sought rollback.

In the culture war, Reagan also looked for rollback, casting the people who had been fighting for their rights in the past decades (black people and women, in particular) as unfairly advantaged over white males.

Bush and Cheney increased what Reagan had begun exponentially, most importantly in the era of foreign policy. The Bush Administration sought – and succeeded – to destroy consensus positions that had stood, at least in America, for over half a century. The most important of these were that the three branches of government were coequal, that torture was immoral and should not be used, and that aggressive war was not an acceptable means to achieve a nation’s ends – that war was only acceptable in self-defense, defense of an ally, or defense of a neutral nation. Preventative war was an old doctrine, not a new one, and one that had become anathema after it resulted in the First World War.

In all three cases, the Bush reaction succeeded as the Reagan one had. The basic positions and principles of 2/3 issues have been accepted by the Obama administration: the US has the right to attack nations that have not attacked it, and the Executive has sweeping security powers not subject to review of either Congress or the Courts. The belief that torture is wrong is no longer consensus; the fact that it is illegal does not mean those who use or implement it are subject to law. Torture is a matter of policy that can and will be reversed the next time there is a Republican administration.

For the last 30 years, history has been moving backwards.

3 Nob Akimoto { 12.21.09 at 9:16 pm }

Well, it’s John Bolton. Do we really take him seriously?

4 Mike Schilling { 12.25.09 at 4:58 pm }

someone who has no political ambitions

I guess wanting to avoid pariahood and prison aren’t strictly speaking political ambitions.