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Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 11:56 AM
Subject: [unioNews] NYTimes.com Article: A Tale of Two Fathers
> This article from NYTimes.com
> has been sent to you by [log in to unmask]
> <H3>A Tale of Two Fathers</H3>
> October 12, 2003
> By MAUREEN DOWD
>
>
>
>
>
> WASHINGTON
>
> It's a classic story line in myth, literature and movies: a
> man coming into his own is torn between two older authority
> figures with competing world views; a good daddy and a bad
> daddy; one light and benevolent, one dark and vengeful.
>
> When Bush the Elder put Bush the Younger in the care of
> Dick Cheney, he assumed that Mr. Cheney, who had been his
> defense secretary in Desert Storm, would play the wise,
> selfless counselor. Poppy thought his old friend Dick would
> make a great vice president, tutoring a young president
> green on foreign policy and safeguarding the first Bush
> administration's legacy of internationalism,
> coalition-building and realpolitik.
>
> Instead, Good Daddy has had to watch in alarm as Bad Daddy
> usurped his son's presidency, heightened its conservatism
> and rushed America into war on the mistaken assumption that
> if we just acted like king of the world, everyone would bow
> down or run away.
>
> Bush I officials are nonplused by the apocalyptic and rash
> Cheney of Bush II, a man who pushed pre-emption and peered
> over the shoulders of C.I.A. analysts, as compared with the
> skeptical and cautious Cheney of Bush I (who did not even
> press to march to Baghdad in the first gulf war, when
> Saddam Hussein actually possessed chemical weapons).
>
> Some veterans of Bush I are so puzzled that they even look
> for a biological explanation, wondering if his two-year-old
> defibrillator might have made him more Hobbesian. Mr.
> Cheney spent so much time in his bunker reading gloomy
> books about smallpox, plague, fear and war as the natural
> state of mankind.
>
> Last week, for the first time, W. - who tried to pattern
> his presidency as the mirror opposite of his real father's
> - curbed his surrogate father's hard-line crony Rummy (Mr.
> Cheney's mentor in the Ford years).
>
> The incurious George, who has said he prefers to get his
> information from his inner circle rather than newspapers or
> TV, may finally be waking up to the downside of such
> self-censorship. You can end up hearing a lot of bogus,
> self-serving garbage from Ahmad Chalabi, via Mr. Cheney and
> Paul Wolfowitz, instead of unpleasant reality.
>
> I hope Mr. Bush at least read the news coverage of his vice
> president's Iraq speech on Friday, which was a masterpiece
> of demagogy.
>
> On a day when many Republicans were finding a lesson of
> moderation in Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory in
> California, Mr. Cheney once more chose a right-wing
> setting, the Heritage Foundation, to regurgitate his rigid
> ideology. While Arnold was saying to voters, "You know
> best," Mr. Cheney was still propounding <object.title
> class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="91117">"Father Knows
> Best."</object.title>
>
> Even after the president was forced to admit after Mr.
> Cheney's last appearance on "Meet the Press" last month
> that the link the vice president drew between Saddam and
> 9/11 did not actually exist, that did not deter Mr. Cheney.
> He repeatedly tied Saddam and 9/11 and said, all evidence
> to the contrary, that the secular Iraqi leader "had an
> established relationship with Al Qaeda."
>
> He characterized critics as naïve and dangerous when his
> own arguments were reductive and disingenuous. In
> justifying the war, he created a false choice between
> attacking Iraq and doing nothing.
>
> The war in Iraq and its aftermath have proved that Mr.
> Cheney was wrong to think that a show of brute strength
> would deter our enemies from attacking us. There are
> improvements in Iraq, but it is still a morass, with 326
> soldiers dead as of Friday. It's hard to create security
> when we are the cause of the insecurity.
>
> Mr. Cheney lumped terrorists and tyrants into one
> interchangeable mass, saying that Mr. Bush could not
> tolerate a dictator who had access to weapons of mass
> destruction, was allied with terrorists and was a threat to
> his neighbors. Sounds a lot like the military dictator of
> Pakistan, not to mention the governments of China and North
> Korea.
>
> To back up his claim that Saddam was an immediate threat,
> the vice president had to distort the findings of David
> Kay, the administration's own weapons hunter, and continue
> to overdramatize the danger of Saddam. "Saddam built,
> possessed and used weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Cheney
> said. Yes, but during the first Bush administration.
>
> <B>Perhaps the president now realizes the Cheney filter is
> dysfunctional. If Mr. Bush still needs a daddy to tell him
> what to do, he should call his own.</B>
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/opinion/12DOWD.html?ex=1066952568&ei=1&en=
4469b42dfb561abe
>
>
> Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
>
>
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