Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Joshua Micah Marshall watches as the Washington Post writes as if it has just broken the story of the psychotic Cheney administration:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: June 24, 2007 - June 30, 2007 Archives: (June 29, 2007 -- 11:33 AM EDT // link): Yesterday David Broder wrote a column which one TPM Reader, more or less fairly, described as Broder's expression of shock, shock at just what Dick Cheney has been up to over the last six-plus years. And this is a good opportunity to say that the Post's 'Angler' series seems to be becoming the trigger for that transition moment where consensus establishment opinion goes from seeing the vice president as the powerful administration heavy with a sometimes creepy but largely comic penchant for secrecy to an altogether more nefarious force who has used his unprecedented power as vice president to advance an agenda of official secrecy, non-accountability, untrammeled executive power, legitmized torture and general degradation of the rule of law.

But this is far too easy. Because the simple fact is that we've known almost all of this for years.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking the series, which is quite good. In journalism, details, the specifics are all. But the story in general has been out there for years, as well as a good number of the specifics, strewn over hundreds, probably thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, online and off.

In other words, when it comes to recognizing Cheney's profoundly damaging effect on American constitutionalism as well as his guiding role in essentially all of the administration's most disastrous policies, the train already left the station some time ago.

Sorry.

Well, I will knock the claims that the Post makes for the series. The Post ought to be ashamed of the way it is selling it. Gellman and Becker are building on a lot of work by other, better journalists and commentators earlier. They ought to acknowledge that. Their honor is at stake.

Thus, when David Broder writes that:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/06/09/DI2007060900033.html: [T]t would have been nearly impossible to duplicate the Cheney series reporting until after the reelect of the Bush-Cheney ticket...

And:

It took a year of digging by Bart Gellman and Jo Becker to begin to crack the cone of secrecy around Cheney...

I say: what about Ron Suskind? Remember Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty. What does it say about Cheney?

Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: Notes: Quotes from Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill.

Ron Suskind (2003), The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (New York: Simon and Schuster: 0743255453).

Mr. Cheney welcomed Mr. O'Neill and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan into the foyer of his two-story brick town house, where boxes were packed for the move to the vice president's mansion. It was late in the afternoon of Jan. 14, the Sunday of the final week of the transition. They settled at the kitchen table, three men in ties, blazers, and slacks, CEO casual, making final preparations for the coming era.... Two hours passed. Mr. Cheney moved to close the circle. The shape of things to come? Tax cuts, Mr. Cheney said, front and center. A task force on energy, which he would run. And everyone stay in close touch about the condition of the economy. All other matters would move on a slower track. Mr. O'Neill left the meeting with a glimpse of the future: that Mr. Cheney would be the most powerful vice president of modern times...

[January 14] All this became clear to Paul O'Neill and Alan Greenspan at the same instant, midway through the waning afternoon. When the centerpiece of the President-elect's plan for America--the $1.6 trillion, ten-year tax cut--was discussed, neither man felt comfortable mentioning the secret "trigger" pact [to make the tax cuts conditional on continued surpluses] to Dick Cheney. They couldn't be sure what Dick would think...

[January 23] [T]he third day of the Bush administration.... Bush had O'Neill's memo--Paul figured they'd talk about that--and then they'd discuss whatever came up.... O'Neill... offered a fifteen minute overview on what he considered the informed opinion (that is, his and Greenspan's) [about the economy].... O'Neill referred to items of his memo.... There were a dozen questions that O'Neill had expected Bush to ask. He was ready with the answers. How large did O'Neill consider the surplus, and how real? How might the tax cut be structured? What about reforming Social Security and Medicare, the budget busters?... Bush didn't ask anything. He looked at O'Neill, not changing his expression, not letting on that he'd had any reactions.... O'Neill decided therefore to move from the economy to a related matter. Steel tariffs.... The President said nothing. No change in expression.... "I wondered, from the first, if the President didn't know the questions to ask," O'Neill recalled, "or did he know and just not want to know the answers? Or did his strategy somehow involve never showing what he thought? But you can ask questions, gather information, and not necessarily show your hand. It was strange"...

At this point in mid-March 2001, a very different model was becoming apparent. it caused confusion for senior officials like O'Neill, Powell, and Whitman.... Was it possible, O'Neill wondered, that the country thought it had elected a centrist when in fact it had empowered an ideologue? The incident with Whitman was the start of what O'Neill later called "a rolling revelation of the way this administration was operating." "What became clear to me at that point," he said... not long after he left office, "is that the presence of me and Colin and Christie helped convince people that this would... be an administration that would look hard for best solutions.... That's what the three of us were known for.... Thinking back about how all of us started to be banged up so early on, from the inside, it now seems like we inadvertantly may have been there, in large part, as cover"...

O'Neill began to view Mr. Lindsey as a partisan for deep tax cuts rather than an honest broker of competing proposals -- an advocate of one point of view who would soon sit about 30 feet from the Oval Office and a president with no experience managing national economic policy. It would be important to pick his moment carefully to make his concern known. It was late on a weeknight. Two lifelong workaholics were still at their posts: Mr. O'Neill and Dick Cheney.... "Dick, I think we need to talk," Mr. O'Neill said. He reasoned that Mr. Cheney would understand the importance of establishing sound processes to manage the White House and executive branch -- entities that were truly beyond human scale. Mr. O'Neill said that he was concerned that Mr. Lindsey was masquerading as the honest broker and was anything but. Without strongly positioned honest brokers and a rigorous, disinterested vetting of various proposals, Mr. O'Neill said, "all you've got are kids rolling around on the lawn." The need to really "run the traps" on every potential presidential move was more important for this Bush than for his father or Gerald Ford, both of whom had vast experience in the federal government. God knows, Mr. Cheney would understand that as well as anyone. Mr. Cheney listened, nodded, listened some more. Dick was not a talker. It was easy to paint what you hoped to see on Dick's concerned, pensive mien. But you could never be certain what he was thinking or what he would do. Mr. Cheney thanked Mr. O'Neill for his insights, and Mr. O'Neill left feeling that he had done his duty...

Sitting in his office in mid-July, Mr. O'Neill sketched some notes for another serious talk he wanted to have with Mr. Cheney about effective process -- a way to handle decision making so that policy didn't get served half-baked and larded with political calculations. In his personal experience, the president didn't appear to have read even the short memos he sent over. During his weekly one-on-one with Mr. O'Neill, Mr. Bush sat, often for an hour, offering no response. He rarely asked questions in meetings. "The only way I can describe it is that, well, the president is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people," Mr. O'Neill said. "There is no discernible connection." Mr. O'Neill thought about how to add fiber to the policy process in this White House, and about how to persuade Mr. Cheney to take the lead. "I realized it would be hard to find things we did with Nixon or Ford that would be applicable for this president," Mr. O'Neill said later. He recalled Mr. Bush's unresponsiveness in large and small meetings. "This president was so utterly different from those men." He stopped by Mr. Cheney's office. The fears he had harbored during the transition -- about "kids rolling around on the lawn" -- had been confirmed, he said. "You can't just move on instinct. You end up making too many mistakes," Mr. O'Neill told the vice president. "We need to be better about keeping politics out of the policy process. The political people are there for presentation and execution, not for creation." As before, Dick nodded. He thanked Paul, as always, "for his sharp insights."

One problem was that [O'Neill] didn't have a chair in the White House senior staff meeting... each morning at 7:30. Robert Rubin... had considered attendance at this meeting... among his most important victories. It placed Rubin's finger on the White House's pulse each morning.... Summers.... O'Neill wasn't going to ask, himself; he had his chief of staff, Tim Adams, inquire several times whether the Secretary could attend. "There was foot dragging and then no response..." While no one would head-on confront an official as powerful as the Secretary of the Treasury...

[Budget Director] Mitch Daniels became agitated. He blurted out, "Well, yes, but if you can't do the right thing when you're at 85 percent approval, then when can you do the right thing? I think it's time to say no." Everyone looked with surprise at Daniels--he has a way of expressing what others are thinking but don't say. Often, he'd find himself doubling back when he got an arched brow from Cheney or Rove...

On Sunday, Feb. 10 [2002], Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Greenspan went to the vice president's house for lunch.... During the campaign, Mr. Cheney had made a commitment of support to steelworkers in West Virginia, a state the ticket carried. Karl Rove, the White House political director, was looking at Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan as crucial states in the upcoming midterm elections. They were inclined to impose major tariffs on imported steel, as a way of helping domestic steelmakers and protecting jobs in those states. What's more, the White House legislative staff was hoping that it could trade support for steel tariffs for a vote or two in the Senate for legislation giving the president authority to reach trade agreements largely without congressional tinkering. Mr. Cheney told Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Greenspan that Mr. Bush and he were going to make a decision on the steel issue. But, clearly, Mr. Cheney didn't want to end up in open debate with Mr. O'Neill, whose stance opposing curbs on steel imports was well informed, or with the unmanageable Mr. Greenspan, chairman of an agency independent of the White House. So, he had granted them an audience. They were getting in early.... Now was their chance, Mr. Cheney told them, to discuss their view of "the right thing to do." Their positions would be duly noted; there would be little more that they needed to say. Mr. Cheney said, "We'll make our decision and, then, that'll be that." Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Greenspan both made the case that the largely bipartisan consensus on free trade was one of the great victories of the last decade; that the president would confuse many constituencies by flouting that consensus. Mr. O'Neill explained that tariffs would do little to offer long-term support to the U.S. steel industry. Mr. Greenspan pointed out that tariffs might actually violate certain World Trade Organization agreements. Mr. Cheney didn't show his hand. Mr. O'Neill left concerned that the meeting was largely tactical -- that the vice president had already made up his mind...

This is what Mr. Cheney had been hoping to avoid -- a split. In fact, it was anything but a split. Nearly everyone seemed on one side; Mr. Cheney and Mr. Zoellick were on the other. A consensus on sound policy was colliding with a political favor. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke. "Why are we thinking about doing this?" he asked in frustration. "I have heard good reasons today not to do it, but I haven't heard one good reason to move forward with tariffs. We can't even say this will improve our steel industry." Finally, it came back to Mr. Cheney. He mumbled that "imports are, in fact, way down from the surge. ... Our minimills are competitive," all arguments against tariffs. But then he added that whatever we do, the tariff-empowering statute says "we can review this in 18 months." In other words, if what we do now is go with tariffs, it will be political bait, and in 18 months -- after the 2002 midterm elections -- we can effect the switch. Meeting over...

Mr. Cheney had shown up at a few of the regular meetings of the economic team. He didn't say much -- he never said much.... Now, the group was meeting on the vice president's turf. As the meeting in Mr. Cheney's office progressed, it became clear that the vice president was ready to weigh in on what the president should do to bolster the economy, and his standing with voters worried about the economy, as the second half of his term began. A package of tax proposals, led by a 50% cut in the individual tax on dividends, had been all but buried since Mr. O'Neill took his stand against it in early September.... After the midterms, though, Mr. O'Neill could sense a change inside the White House.... Now Mr. Cheney mentioned them again, how altering the double taxation of dividends would provide some economic stimulus. Mr. O'Neill jumped in, arguing sharply that the government "is moving toward a fiscal crisis" and then pointing out "what rising deficits will mean to our economic and fiscal soundness." Mr. Cheney cut him off. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said. Mr. O'Neill was speechless, hardly believing that Mr. Cheney -- whom he and Mr. Greenspan had known since Dick was a kid -- would say such a thing. Mr. Cheney moved to fill the void. "We won the midterms. This is our due." Mr. O'Neill left Mr. Cheney's office in a state of mild shock.... The inscrutable Mr. Cheney had finally shown himself...

Seems to me that Ron Suskind, back in 2003, had done more than "begin to crack the cone of secrecy around Cheney." Honorable men and women should not be ashamed to give him credit.

P.S.: One of the few moments--no, it turns out it's the only moment--Bush says anything substantive in the entire book:

p. 71 ff: President Bush echoed this view: "We're going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict. We're going to tilt it back toward Israel. And we're going to be consistent. Clinton overreached, and it all fell apart. That's why we're in trouble," Bush said. "If the two sides don't want peace, there's no way we can force them." Then the President halted. "Anybody here ever met [Ariel] Sharon?" After a moment, Powell sort of raised his hand. Yes, he had. "I'm not going to go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon," Bush said. "I'm going to take him at face value. We'll work out a relationship based on how things go." He'd met Sharon briefly, Bush said, when they had flown over Israel in a helicopter on a visit in December 1998. "Just saw him that one time. We flew over the Palestinian camps," Bush said sourly. "Looked real bad down there. I don't see much we can do over there at this point. I think it's time to pull out of that situation."

And that was it, according to O'Neill and several other people in the room. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a mess, and the United States would disengage. The combatants would have to work it out on their own. Powell said such a move might be hasty. He remarked on the violence in the West Bank and Gaza and on its roots. He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and the Israeli army. "The consequences of that could be dire," he said, "especially for the Palestinians."

Bush shrugged. "Maybe that's the best way to get things back in balance." Powell looked startled. "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things," Bush said...