Bill McGurn, a sensible man in his youth, stretches for every non sequitur in the book to exonerate David Addington, who is Cheney’s unrepentant torture advocate in the terror wars. Why, Addington used to work at the CIA, and his father was a general! Case closed!
I’ve sat through hundreds of hearings, many of them contentious. I have never seen a man so arrogant and insolent as Addington during his recent appearance before a congressional committee. McGurn complains that press accounts describing that performance employed “language you would use to describe an animal.” Bill, maybe that’s because Mr. Addington acted like an animal — and did so intentionally.
When Cheney was irked by Senator Pat Leahy on the floor of the Senate a few years ago, the VP famously responded with “The Cheney” — a crude vulgarity (Go **** yourself”) of which Cheney later smugly boasted publicly.
Cheney’s wife Lynn is the author of lesbian soft pornography, so his language does not surprise. And Cheney is a control freak, so it’s a cinch that he sent Addington to give the Congress “The Cheney” too. Major League. Big Time.
And they probably high-fived when he got back to the White House.
In “The Lives of Others,” a stellar movie directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, playwright Georg Dreyman confronts Anton Grubitz after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Grubitz, a former Stasi commander, had once directed the round-the-clock Stasi surveillance of Dreyman. “To think that the likes of you once ruled this country,” Dreyman observes, after Grubitz accosts him with a vulgarity.
Grubitz and Cheney. What a pair. Let us pray that some day, in this land of the free, someone will be able to penetrate the former Vice President’s Praetorian Guard and say, to Mr. Cheney’s face, “to think that the likes of you once ruled this country.”
Better duck, though. He’ll give you “The Cheney,” for sure.
1:59 pm on July 22, 2008
