Trouble in paradise?

November 8, 2005

The New York Daily News’ Thomas DeFrank, who has solid WH connections, reported today that Bush and the man the president calls “Vice” aren’t getting along as well as they used to.

The CIA leak scandal has peeled back the veil on the most closely held White House secret of all: the subtle but unmistakable erosion in the bond between President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Multiple sources close to Bush told the Daily News that while the vice president remains his boss’ valued political partner and counselor, his clout has lessened – primarily as a result of issues arising from the Iraq war.

“The relationship is not what it was,” a presidential counselor said. “There has been some distance for some time.”

The DeFrank article seems to be part of a trend. Last week, Newsweek reported that Cheney’s influence is on the wane. (The article quoted a senior official sympathetic to Cheney as saying, “You can say that the influence of the vice president is going to decrease, but it’s hard to decrease from zero.”) Time magazine added that Bush has “lost some of his confidence in” the people he’s listened to most — a group that included Cheney.

I don’t doubt that the Bush gang is leaking this narrative, but I’m a little skeptical of its accuracy. The idea, apparently, is to make Bush look more like a strong leader by saying the president no longer needs his Cheney training wheels. Five years after assuming the presidency, and at the tender age of 59, Bush is all grown up and can finally run the executive branch on his own. Or so the story goes.

These leaks also show Bush “handling” the Plame scandal without actually doing anything. The Office of the Vice President was involved in outing a CIA agent and Cheney’s chief of staff is under indictment. What does the president do in response? His aides leak word that Cheney is in the doghouse. That’ll show him.

Coordinated leaks notwithstanding, there’s mounting evidence that Cheney is as powerful as ever. His office continues to run the national security policy of the federal government and Cheney still, sometimes personally, is leading the way on defending torture.

The Bush-Cheney “bond” may have eroded, but if Cheney’s position, power, and authority remains the same, these stories will mean about as much as Bush’s promise to fire anyone involved with the Plame leak. In other words, nothing.

Tee-hee, Cheney Training Wheels.

  • A little off-topic, but something I was hoping to see an article on. Here in Portland it was the afternoon edition headline for the Oregonian newspaper, Bush in Panama says “We do not torture.”

    WTF? This guy is more Nixonian than Nixon and more Orwellian than, um, IngSoc. This is the guy who at the same time is threatening to tank a military budget because it has a provision to ban torture (once again, since it’s already prohibited). This is the guy whose administration’s legal counsel tried to justify its use, and, lo-and-behold, this is the administration under which we see rampant, endemic use of torture. Photographs from Abu Ghraib, people! This is, as they say, the work of a few bad apples – the ones at the top.

    Sorry, since I saw that headline I was looking for an outlet to bring it up.

  • Rian – staying off-topic with you. Right – where is the media around to scoff and ask the Dem leaders what they think of the President’s statement.

    If “..We do not torture.” – then why the angst and pressure from Cheney’s office on the “torture amendment” in regards to CIA. Since we don’t torture, while it may be not-needed (wink-wink), why not have the amendment on the books.

    Could it be, that, gasp, we DO torture and Shrub II is not in touch with reality.

  • A little off-topic…

    Sit tight, guys, I’m doing a post about this soon. Give me an hour.

  • Rian,

    I’m glad you brought up his “We do not torture” quote. Obviously, this is playing to the group of Americans who like to live in denial (Repugs, Religious Right, and the apathetic, “I don’t like politics” crowd – apx. 250 million Americans).

    Do it and say the opposite. Say something then do the opposite. This has been the admin’s M.O. from day one. There is a litany of examples, from “I don’t believe in nation building” to “I will fire anyone who leaked names”. It just doesn’t happen.

    And they know that no one will call them on it, so they continue to do it. All evidence points to the fact that this admin has been trying to weaken the Geneva conventions and allow more uses of torture…but they will continue to deny that we do it.

    Which brings us to the Bush/Cheney relationship. They say that Cheney has no influence and is in the doghouse. So obviously that means that he is more in control than ever before and nothing has changed.

    If Orwell were alive today, he would change the title of that book to “2005”.

  • Do it and say the opposite. Say something then do the opposite.

    Well Grid, at least he’s consistant. That’s the way things worked while he was governor of Texas too. I’m SO ready to have a different leader.

    Three more years…. sigh

  • I have no doubt that the “bond” between the two has eroded – it should have, even for a fool like this president. It does not however folllow, that this means the president is strong. Even the stupidist and the most foolish occasionally, if accidentally, stumble on the truth and get a wiff of the coffee once in a while.

    Cheney is strong – if for no other reason than he is a bully. But the fact that there seems to be some resistance and a little leaking of news/info that 3 years ago that would have never seen the light of day, does show that even people as bullied as those hacks in the administration get fed up eventually.

  • I think it was Atrios that said the following about the push-back by Cheney & Co. on the torture amendment:

    “We don’t torture and the not torturing we do is vital to national security so don’t ask about it.”

    That’s my talking point of the FREAKING YEAR.

  • It’s all hypnosis. The Cheney administration (as Billmon calls it) is doing hypnosis. Has been since 2000. Shrub is really good at it; his tortured syntaxes is hypnotic patterns :-). Is our children learning? Learned it from his CIA-agent dad.

    In particular, the “we don’t torture but the not-torturing we do is vital to our security” is classic hypnosis.

    Bandler gives the delightful example of shrinks using hypnosis to attempt to dismiss hypnosis: “Hypnosis is bad, AND it doesn’t exist”.

    To claim something doesn’t exist, and to simultaneously pass judgement on it (pro or con) is itself pure hypnosis. It’s junko logic, which is what most of hypnosis actually is.

    The common hypnotic trick is to superimpose two things which are more than tangential to each other, they’re logically impossible.

    Which is why it was so funny when shrinks would attempt that exact trick as part of rejecting hypnosis.

    And here comes the Cheney Administration doing the same thing.

    By claiming that “torture doesn’t exist AND it is good” is a classic hypnotic trick. Orwell even gave it a nice pithy name: “doublethink”.

    Even if they don’t use the exact sentence that Atrios used, they are still employing a hypnotic pattern.

  • If the Bush-Cheney bond has weakened, it surely must be to the detriment of the weaker party. So Bush must be even more out of the loop now in the Cheney Administration.

  • What do people expect when they elect an idiot with an IQ of 81 for president and now a couple of the puppetmasters got caught.

  • I agree with Catherine. If relations between Bush and Cheney are strained, then Junior is the one who’s going to blink and resign for “health reasons.”

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