Cheneyworld: Robot Gone Wild

Watching the VP interview by Jim Lehrer on PBS last night recalled the movie "Westworld" about a theme park in which lifelike robots run amok and start killing. It came out at the time that an automaton named Dick Cheney, codenamed Backseat by the Secret Service, was serving in the White House, getting toilet leaks fixed and installing a headrest for Betty Ford on the presidential helicopter.

More than three decades later, asked whether 4500 American and more than a hundred thousand Iraqi deaths were "worth" what happened there, the now glorified robot answers, "I think so...Because I believed at the time that what Saddam Hussein represented was, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, was a terror-sponsoring state--so designated by the State Department. He was making payments to the families of suicide bombers; he provided a safe haven and sanctuary for Abu Nidal and other terrorist operations. He had produced and used weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological agents.

"He'd had a nuclear program in the past. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and he did have a relationship with al-Qaida...That's not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11; it is to say, as George Tenet, CIA director testified in open session in the Senate, that there was a relationship there that went back 10 years."

In Cheneyworld, ask a question and the pre-recorded tape spools out the automatic answer. In that hermetically sealed space, the response about mistakes in Iraq, illegal torture, the economic meltdown, whatever is same robotic "I don't buy that."

In his insightful book, "Rise of the Vulcans," James Mann reported that "Cheney's ascent in the Ford White House served as an illustration of how an individual can rise to the top by virtue of his willingness to take care of the mundane chores that persons with larger egos avoid, thereby establishing reliability and learning all the inner workings of an organization.

"Cheney was akin to the clerk who becomes chief executive, the copy editor who rises to become editor in chief, the accountant who takes over the film studio."

But just as the Yul Brenner gunslinger robot in Westworld turned murderous without blinking an eye, we now have the 2009 model Cheney, with real blood on his hands after an eight-year rampage, still spouting the programmed answers to what he was doing all that time.

3972 Reasons for Nader Not to Run

John Roberts, Samuel Alito and US fatalities in Iraq head the list of what might have been avoided if America's crusader had stayed off the ballot in 2000 and not provided George W. Bush with the margins he needed to win the White House.

Now here he is again, on Meet the Press, puffing away at the importance of third-party candidates in pushing Democrats and Republicans toward ideological purity, pooh-poohing the complaint that he gave us a President who has tilted the Supreme Court away from what Nader's admirers believe and into a war that he and they deplore.

In declaring his candidacy yet again, Nader, who will be 74 this week, is in a dead heat with Ann Coulter for becoming this year's foremost example of Reverse Attention Deficit Disorder, the compulsive need to preen for TV cameras at any cost.

What they have in common is Hillary Clinton. Coulter claims she would support her rather than John McCain, and Nader would do anything to keep another Clinton out of the White House.

Of the two, Coulter is a more benign case, providing only passing amusement in her quest for attention. Nader is a self-deluded disgrace who might pose an actual danger of electing Bush's anointed successor if it were not for the comforting fact that he drew less than half of one percent of the vote in 2004.

The Blunder Bus Rolls On

The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld top command had plenty of company in mismanaging the war in Iraq, a Pentagon study shows.

Hundreds of U.S. Marines were killed or injured by roadside bombs when Marine Corps bureaucrats refused urgent requests in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles.

The study disclosed today by the AP accuses the service of "gross mismanagement" that delayed deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years.

Stateside paper shufflers sidetracked orders for the heavily armored MRAPs that could have prevented casualties from the IEDs that were decimating US troops on the basis of their cost of almost $1 million each to expedite plans for lighter vehicles still on the drawing board.

Without the knowledge of the Marine Corps Commandant, a field General's requests were sent to a civilian logistics official in suburban Washington. "As a result," the study contends, "there was more concern over how the MRAP would upset the Marine Corps' supply and maintenance chains than there was in getting the troops a truck that would keep them alive."

It was only when current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made the trucks the top priority last year that the vehicles started to be shipped in large quantities.

More than 800 Marines have been killed and almost 8400 wounded in Iraq, most of them by explosive devices. The former Marine officer who wrote the report had to file for whistle-blower protection last year with the US Office of Special Counsel after being threatened with disciplinary action for meeting with Congressional staff members.

The Corps seems to have moved more swiftly to protect bureaucrats and their bosses than troops in the field.

Iraq Death Watch Numbers Game

After the Civil War, Gen. Robert E. Lee turned down all offers to write his memoirs, saying that to do so would “be trading on the blood of my men.” That delicacy of feeling is long gone.

Now Washington bureaucrats are not at all squeamish about using soldiers’ blood for political profit. Case in point is the claim that American combat deaths have gone down since the Surge started and, as the McClatchy Newspapers reported, “Military officials and observers are wondering whether the lower U.S. casualties are a sign of success...”

A recent post questioning this “sign of success” has drawn a rebuttal of what McClatchy calls “vitriolic criticism...from liberal web sites.”

This “vitriolic” retired journalist has long been an admirer of the reporting by McClatchy, formerly Knight Ridder, particularly in the selling of the Iraq war by the Bush Administration, and the criticism of the numbers story was clearly aimed at the Pentagon source rather than the messenger.

Readers can judge for themselves, but there is a new kind of callous ingenuity in stressing certain kinds of deaths over others, particularly when one source of the numbers--an August helicopter crash that killed 14 U.S. troops--is officially an accident but an Air Force spokesman “could not rule out a strike by a surface to air missile.”

But it’s saddening to be arguing about how our young people are dying rather than why.