An Excellent Point

The passage below (the last paragraph in particular) is an excellent observation about an article that appeared in the Washington Post earlier this week entitled "Cheney Uncloaks His Frustration With Bush."

My first thought was to avoid like the plague a Veep pick who doesn't have ambitions (or is too old) to be POTUS in eight years but that's a dumb idea. Finally a moment of clarity prevailed and I realized that as much damage as Darth Cheney reaped on the world, ultimately it really wasn't his fault.

Darth C was just a kid in a candy store whose Daddy was too intellectually barren to know that jawbreakers aren't weapons of mass destruction. Many mistakes were made and crimes committed but let's not forget the real error came from selecting Dubya to begin with.

From the Spectator (UK)...

But note too the sense, as relayed by this Cheney confidante at least, that Cheney was disappointed the President moved away from him. It's almost as if the Vice-President was horrified to discover that the President had ideas of his own. In this piece at least, Cheney actually endorses the caricature of a black-hatted Veep pulling the stings and manipulating a callow, incurious President.

Republicans used to claim that Cheney's lack of Presidential ambition was a good thing since it meant he had no axe to grind, no position to take that would advance his own political interests. Instead he would be the candid friend and the source of much sage advice, drawn from his decades spent in Washington.

And there was something to that idea. But it's also apparent that Cheney's lack of political ambition was also a weakness. It seems to have persuaded him, in the instances cited by Gellman at least, to ignore any and all political calculations as though they didn't matter and only the weak or the foolish would pay any attention to political realities. In that sense, Cheney was a deeply irresponsible Vice-President.

Torturing prisoners, illegal surveillance of American citizens, agitating for regime change in Tehran and Pyongyang while Iraq and Afghanistan remained in turmoil: these are not the policies of a man who gives a damn about public opinion.

Freed from any kind of electoral or political reality, Cheney was able to rampage through Washington, doing all kinds of damage to almost every institution or office or agency he touched. That's the price you pay for Cheney's lack of personal political ambition. We often think of political ambition as something to be wary of - and rightly so - but Cheney demonstrates that the quiet lack of personal ambition can have disastrous consequences too, for it frees a man from having to be accountable for his actions, permitting him to justify anything and everything if it moves him an inch closer to achieving goals that he, and he alone, has set.