Skip to main content

Grumpy Old Man

By


You have to hand it to ol' Dick.  He doesn't miss an opportunity to castigate the current president.  He can't even write a short "biography" without condemning the Obama administration, turning an innocuous occasion like the Wyoming State Bar convention into front page news.  Now, others from around the country will no doubt fill the vacancies left by Wyoming lawyers who were upset by Cheney politicizing the event.

Some thought that having a new ticker would give the former Veep a new lease on life, but since his heart transplant in 2012 he hasn't let this administration off the hook, blaming it for anything and everything under the sun.  As a result, he makes many appearances, like this one on ABC News only four months after the surgery.  He used this opportunity to castigate Obama as well, calling him one the weakest presidents in history, and saying he even preferred Carter.  Of course, that was an election year and maybe he thought he was helping his buddy, Mitt Romney, out.

It's been a busy year for Dick.  He has a new book out in hardback and another one issued in paperback, as well as a documentary, all of which he has been busily promoting on the talk show circuit.  At each and every turn comes another swipe at Obama.  A veritable "one-man zombie apocalypse," as Ana Marie Cox points out in this book review of Heart, released last October.

At some point you have to wonder to what degree this contempt for the president is pathological.  Of course, you could say that about many persons on the Right, who have been vociferously antagonistic toward Obama even before he took the oath of office.  Rush Limbaugh was among those who hoped Obama failed as President.  So did Dick, it seems, as he continues to admonish the President for a foreign policy he helped set while serving in the Bush administration.

Fact of the matter, the Obama administration hasn't failed.  His administration might not have delivered on the hope many had during the 2008 election that he would set a new tone for the White House, but Obama has maintained a steady course throughout the last six years, with a slowly improving economy and a foreign policy based as much on international cooperation as on American hubris.

But, the Wyoming State Bar won't see a debate on the merits and demerits of the Obama White House.  Cheney will have his unfettered say on the matter before a convention full of lawyers, who probably won't care much one way or the other what the former Veep has to say.  However, I doubt anyone will be inviting Dick quail hunting afterward.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more