Dick Cheney

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
James Nance Garner born in a mud chinked log cabin
near Uvalde, Texas, who rose to the vice presidency could
never have imagined Richard Bruce Cheney of Lincoln, Nebraska, who
did the same. Where it was Garner who famously said, quote,
being vice president ain't worth a bucket of warm spit unquote.

(00:21):
Cheney missed that dose of history, for he was the
most influential and powerful vice president in the country's two
hundred and forty nine years. How do we know? President
Barack Obama once quipped, Dick Cheney says, I'm the worst
president of his lifetime. Well, he was the worst president
of mine. Humor is most funny when there is a

(00:44):
shred of truth in it. The country thought about Cheney
all day yesterday upon the news of his death made
it to eighty four, even though he was born with
a bad heart, suffered through five heart attacks and eight
heart events. His political enemies, of which there are many,
might well order an autopsy to prove convincingly that he
actually had won nearly twenty years after he exited the

(01:07):
levers of power. It's quite clear maybe we did have
two presidents between two thousand and one and two thousand
and nine, when the planes struck the buildings on nine
to eleven, President Bush's lack of international and military experience glowed.
He was angry and wanted to hunt down the terrorists
that day, but he didn't know how. Turns to Cheney,

(01:28):
who became the architect of the War on Terror. He
alone supervised warrant surveillance, circumventing Congress and the requirements of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, essentially allowing the government to
nearly free reign to spy on anybody. It was later
abused by Obama's White House against Donald Trump. He orchestrated

(01:50):
Bush's decision to wave off the Geneva Conventions, protecting POW's
from cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. Cheney was the mastermind
of robust interrogation, including waterboarding, of terrorist prisoners. If the
goal was no more terrorist attacks, to Cheney, the ends
easily justified the means. By working in the shadows of power,

(02:14):
saying little and listening a lot, he mined power so
effectively in W's first term, insiders referred to him as regent,
who in literature is the subordinate who wields the real
power over a boy King, Cheney remodeled the workflow in
the West Wing. When the National Security Council produced the

(02:34):
President's Daily Briefing, it went through Cheney first. He was
the first vice president in history to see the daily
Global Threat Assessment before the president. Why because Cheney, though
an avowed constitutionalist, or so he said, deep down found
a democracy inefficient when it came to national security. To Cheney,

(02:56):
extremism and defensive lives is no vice. Law be damned.
Secrecy and supremacy in protecting the people should not be
in the hands of Congress. After the abuses of Watergate,
the fall of Nixon, the loss in Vietnam, Cheney believed
Congress overreached, stripped presidents of the authority to protect the country.

(03:16):
He saw those knee jerk laws like the War Powers Act,
the Presidential Records Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and
all restrictions on covert action as weakening the country. Tough
guy who lost not one minute of sleep over Abu Grabe,
he was also a paradox. Upon his ascension device, he
was both prudent and paranoid. In seven, he had the

(03:39):
WiFi in his implanted cardiac defibrillator disabled, fearing some foreign
bad actor might send a signal inducing cardiac arrest. When
w asked him to vet VP candidates for the ticket
in two thousand, Cheney saw it as his chance to
get those lost powers back into the White House. Less
well known is that Cheney was positioning himself for the job.

(04:03):
After compelling the parade of applicants to surrender their most
sensitive secrets, Cheney, in at least one case, used the
information against the guy. When presenting his varnished summary of
candidates to Bush, it was clear the least objectionable was Dick.
Bush trusted him because Cheney made it clear I don't
want to be president in the gig, He could then

(04:25):
exercise his assembled power, knowing the vice president is the
only employee in the government the president cannot fire. If
we all had those protections, we might push the envelope
to the edge too,