x-posted at
Kautilyan
This had to be one of the more pathetic political articles I've read in a while. Adam Nagourney and Richard Stevenson of the Times basically do a puff piece on Cheney describing his decisiveness during 9/11 and his great partnership with W. All of the sources are from the White House or are such impartial observers like Mary Matalin and Newt Gingrich. Its almost as if they had to write this article as a counterweight to the NYT recent sharp criticism of Bush and Cheney's manipulation of tying Iraq to 9/11
When it came to making one of the most agonizing decisions any leader could imagine - ordering fighter jets to shoot civilian airliners out of the sky - George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did it together, after the most hurried of conversations in the most trying of moments.
President Bush was in his office in the forward cabin of Air Force One as he sought safety in the skies over the South on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Vice President Cheney was hidden in the bunker beneath the White House, talking to Mr. Bush in tense telephone conversations through the most fearful and threatening moments of their terms.
Mr. Bush, in an account the two men provided to the commission investigating the attacks that was released on Thursday, said that in one of the calls with his vice president he authorized shooting down civilian airplanes that might have been seized by hijackers. But it was Mr. Cheney who, "in about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing," as one person in the room told the commission, issued the shoot-down order as he weighed reports of a hijacked commercial airplane streaking toward Washington.
Mr. Cheney acted so swiftly that one White House aide in the bunker suggested that he call back Mr. Bush to make sure that the president knew what his No. 2 was doing.
...man, he's just so bold and decisive... and then we learn what a great relationship the two men had
When Mr. Cheney took office, he was widely viewed as having the steady hand of experience that could help the new president in dealing with the foreign policy and national security challenges that Mr. Bush had not faced during his one term as the governor of Texas. Aides to both men said that Mr. Cheney has served that role loyally and effectively - perhaps no time more than that morning in the bunker. It was a moment that illustrated the symbiotic relationship of these two men: vice president and president, tutor and tutored.
...Yet the almost unspoken nature of the conversation that morning signaled the unusual depth of the relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, and even this week as Mr. Cheney has been under fire, aides to both men were quick to portray him as an integral part of Mr. Bush's White House and his campaign ahead.
Like the NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller, Nagourney and Stevenson continue the efforts to try to spin the Cheney-Bush relationship to define puppetry down as I wrote some time back. This despite lots of evidence (e.g. from the WSJ) that Cheney basically ran the show. What's really galling is that they used this "special relationship" spin to justify the joint appearance by Bush and Cheney in front of the 9/11 commission:
It is a sign of their relationship that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush insisted on appearing together in testifying before the commission when it asked to interview them about their experiences that day.
Yes, that's right and there are NO QUOTES around that statement. This is the grand determination of Adam Nagourney and Richard Stevenson as to why the President of the United States could not testify on his own. Jeez, even Reagan with early Alzheimers testified without help in Iran Contra.
And get a load of this. We get this unquestioned reasoning from Mary Matalin as to why Cheney is only looking out for the best interests of the country:
Mary Matalin, one of Mr. Cheney's senior advisers, said that one of the things that drew Mr. Bush to Mr. Cheney four years ago was that given his age he had no political ambitions beyond being vice president. That, she said, had proved particularly critical in the months after the attack. It was also valuable now as the two men manage a re-election campaign.
"He doesn't have any personal aspirations," she said. "There's no conventional way to look at it. We are dealing with somebody who has no concern about their own future.''
She added, "There is no separate Cheney P.R. machine."
Did it occur to these guys to mention that Cheney is 63 years old which is just 5 years older than Bush? Recall that mankind's greatest leader ever, Ronald Reagan was about 69 when he became President in 1980.
Okay, I think I'm gonna stop now....