“When Used For The Right Purpose”: Was Cheney Right That “Deficits Don’t Matter”?
After the Republicans gained control of the US Senate in the 2002 election, giving them across-the-board dominance of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, the key players in the administration of President George W. Bush gathered to discuss fiscal policy.
Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to cut taxes for the rich.
Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was skeptical. According to his recounting of the incident in Ron Suskind’s brilliant book, The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill expressed concern that a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts had already been enacted. O’Neill was no liberal. He liked tax cuts. But with the country rebuilding from the economic slowdown after the 9/11 attacks, and with a war being fought in Afghanistan and another on the horizon in Iraq, O’Neill noted that the budget deficit was increasing. And he argued against Cheney’s position, suggesting that another tax cut was unnecessary and unwise.
“You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” said the vice president. “We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.”
O’Neill was, according to Suskind, left speechless.
But Cheney wasn’t done. He and the Bush-Cheney administration that he served as CEO piled up deficits and debts. Indeed, as The New York Times has well noted, “Under Mr. Bush, tax cuts and war spending were the biggest policy drivers of the swing from projected surpluses to deficits from 2002 to 2009. Budget estimates that didn’t foresee the recessions in 2001 and in 2008 and 2009 also contributed to deficits. Mr. Obama’s policies, taken out to 2017, add to deficits, but not by nearly as much.”
Now, a decade later, Cheney’s party is arguing that deficits matter. A lot. House Republicans are so fretful that they are willing to steer the country toward chaos by refusing the compromises that would avert across-the-board sequester cuts. Other Republicans uncomfortable with sequestration are pushing an austerity agenda that’s better organized than the sequester, but potentially even more painful.
So was Cheney right in 2002? Or is he right, now, when he cheers on Republican attacks on Obama’s spending and says, “I worship the ground Paul Ryan walks on”?
The fact is that deficits are relevant.
So are debts.
Nations must treat them seriously.
But nations do not have to fear deficits, any more than Dick Cheney did on that day in the fall of 2002. And in that sense Cheney was right: deficits don’t matter if they are employed for a purpose. Cheney’s purpose—cutting taxes for the rich—was dubious. But stimulating the economy, expanding access to healthcare, funding state and local governments and protecting seniors on Social Security… these are good, and necessary, purposes.
Spending has value, especially when it is needed. As Bob Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future reminds us: “The U.S. has witnessed slow growth since coming out of the Great Recession in 2009. The result has been a deficit that has come down from over 10 percent of gross domestic product to a projected 5.3 percent of GDP this year (slightly higher if Congress is sensible enough to repeal the sequester) and a projected 2.4 percent in 2015 (if congressional austerity bombs don’t blow up the weak recovery).”
For Cheney’s political heirs to claim now that the United States is in crisis, or at a “tipping point,” is absurd. For them to refuse to govern until they get their way, throwing one tantrum after another, is irresponsible. For them to see value in sequester cuts that impose real pain on real people is not just crude, it’s economically senseless—and dangerous to the long-term prospects for economic renewal and growth.
President Obama needs to push back against the deficit fabulists. He does not have to echo Cheney’s glib “deficits don’t matter” talk. But he should explain, as economist Dean Baker does, that the ranting and raving about deficits and debts by groups such as Pete Peterson’s Fix the Debt campaign and its co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is “the great distraction.”
America should be focused on the economic challenges that have slowed our economy, and that have caused our government to run up deficits and debts. We need to be focused on putting people to work and growing the economy, not playing sequester games that result in real job losses and create an equally real threat of recession.
When the Fix the Debt crew gather, as Baker has noted, “many of the people most responsible for the current downturn come together to tell us why we should be worried about the deficit at a time when 25 million people are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work altogether and millions face the prospect of losing their homes.”
Our concern as a country should be with shaping the policies and making the investments that find work for the jobless and create the robust economic growth that creates surpluses. That’s far more vital than the focus on fiscal issues and the deficits that Dick Cheney explained—back when he was in power—“don’t matter.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, March 1, 2013
‘”We Did Participate In A Hoax”: How The Bush Administration Lied Us Into The Iraq War
David Corn at Mother Jones offers a preview of some of the new information coming Monday night in Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, an MSNBC documentary based on the book of a similar name
Narrated by Rachel Maddow, the film, like the book, will detail the inside story of how America and the world were knowingly scammed by the Bush administration into invading Iraq 10 years ago next month, leading to, as Corn describes it, “a nine-year war resulting in 4,486 dead American troops, 32,226 servicemembers wounded, and over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians.”
“The tab for the war topped $3 trillion,” he adds, even though “it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and no significant operational ties between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. That is, the two main assertions used by Bush and his crew to justify the war were not true.”
The facts of how the nation was conned into going to war, Maddow has argued over the past week while promoting and previewing the new film, are important to understand in order to avoid the same thing happening again. “If what we went through 10 years ago did not change us as a nation — if we do not understand what happened and adapt to resist it — then history says we are doomed to repeat it,” she warns.
Maddow says the documentary will likely ruffle many political feathers, and Corn offers a few of the nuggets of new information on the scam that have been revealed since the publication of his and Isikoff’s 2007 book, and that will be presented in the MSNBC film. Among them…
—Retired general Anthony Zinni, former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, explains his reaction to then-VP Dick Cheney’s infamous declaration that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Zinni, who was sitting on the stage with Cheney during that 2002 speech to the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, says,”It was a shock. It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”
—A November 2001 briefing memo declassified two years ago and used by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during a meeting with General Tommy Franks, details how the administration hoped to trigger a justification for going to war in Iraq. One of those triggers, the memo suggests, was to be a “dispute over WMD inspections,” akin to the one which was eventually, and very publicly, manufactured to help fuel the phony case for war.
—According to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell was skeptical of the entire case for war, but hid that from the public, even as he was used by the administration to sell the war to the UN Security Council and the American public. “Powell walked into my office,” on the day Congress passed its resolution giving authority to Bush to attack Iraq, Wilkerson explains in the film, “and without so much as a fare-thee-well, he walked over to the window and he said, ‘I wonder what’ll happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing?’ And he turned around and walked back in his office. And I — I wrote that down on my calendar — as close…to verbatim as I could, because I thought that was a profound statement coming from the secretary of state, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.”
Wilkerson goes on to add that, in truth, Powell — who now regards his UN speech as a “painful” “blot” on his career — had no clue whether the intelligence he cited to the UN was actually legitimate. “Though neither Powell nor anyone else from the State Department team intentionally lied,” says Wilkerson, “we did participate in a hoax.”
By: Brad Friedman, The National Memo, February 18, 2013
“A Man Of Misconduct And Malfeasance”: Dick Cheney Disdains The ‘Second-Rate’ Obama Team
No doubt President Obama was deeply stung over the weekend to hear Dick Cheney criticize his new national security team. At a Wyoming Republican Party dinner, the former vice president briskly dismissed Obama’s choices as “dismal,” saying that America needs “good people” rather than the “second-rate” figures selected by the president, particularly Vietnam veteran and long-time U.S. senator Chuck Hagel, nominated by the president as Secretary of Defense.
For sage advice on security policy and personnel, after all, there is no living person whose approval could be more meaningful than Cheney. It is hard to imagine a record as profoundly impressive as that of the Bush-Cheney administration, back when everyone knew that he was really in charge of everything important — especially the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan.
True, Cheney’s intelligence apparatus failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden after 9/11 – indeed, failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks, despite ample warnings that began with Bill Clinton’s farewell message in January, 2001 and culminated in a blaring President’s Daily Brief from the CIA in August 2001. True, Cheney’s defense command allowed bin Laden and Mullah Omar to escape following the invasion of Afghanistan, while American and NATO troops slogged through that deadly conflict without a plausible goal or even an exit strategy. And true, the national security cabinet run by Cheney misled the nation into war against Iraq, on false premises, without adequate preparation or clear objectives, at a cost of many thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. And true, too, the ultimate result was to embarrass the United States repeatedly while increasing the regional power of the mullahs in Iran.
How can Obama presume to compare his own record with all of that?
Obviously Cheney’s success cannot be measured by achievement alone. That wouldn’t be fair at all. No, his success resides in the capacity to commit disastrous misconduct and malfeasance in office, and still be taken seriously by the serious people in Washington, D.C.
If only the president were sensible enough to appoint figures of the same caliber as Cheney’s choices in the Bush years – men such as Donald Rumsfeld, whose capacity to deceive the public remains unequaled a full decade after he first declared utter certainty about the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein’s huge, perilous cache of “weapons of mass destruction.”
“We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat,” explained Rummy somewhat inanely. He also assured us that the Iraqi people would warmly welcome U.S. troops, that the war would require a commitment of no more than six months, and that we wouldn’t need to send an overwhelming force of troops to prevail.
Like his old comrade and boss Cheney, Rumsfeld remained perfectly arrogant and absolutely rigid to the end and beyond, even as all his predictions and promises proved tragically hollow. Even when he came under attack by the neoconservative propaganda apparatus, led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, for “glibly passing the buck” for administration failures, Rumsfeld never admitted any fault or responsibility. Leaving office in disgrace, he spent years composing a farrago of falsehoods to be published between hard covers, seeking to justify his reign of error — and topped the bestseller lists following a triumphant tour of television and radio.
Now there was a first-rate Defense Secretary. President Obama, please take note.
By: Joe Conason, the National Memo, February 11, 2013
“Dick Cheney With A Smile”: Paul Ryan Confirms That In The GOP, Neoconservative Fantasy Dies Hard
Never afraid to go against the crowd, or the facts, Dick Cheney found Paul Ryan’s performance in Thursday night’s vice presidential debate dazzling.
Following the debate, Cheney declared that ”there is no question in my mind when I look at Joe Biden and Paul Ryan on the stage there last night, I think Paul Ryan’s got what it takes to take over as president. I don’t think Joe Biden does.”
How did George W. Bush’s number-two see what so many mere mortals missed?
Cheney pays serious attention to Ryan.
Indeed, he says: “I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on.”
And no one should doubt Cheney’s sincerity.
The former Republican vice president adores the Republican vice presidential candidate because Ryan is a fresh, young Cheney.
Cheney moved to Washington as soon as he could and became a political careerist, working as a Capitol Hill aide, a think-tank hanger on and then a member of Congress. Ryan followed the same insider trajectory.
Cheney’s a hyper-partisan Republican with a history of putting party loyalty above everything else. Ryan’s an equally loyal GOP mandarin.
Cheney’s a rigid ideologue who has never let reality get in the way of cockamamie neocon theories about where to start the next war. And Ryan’s every bit as much a neocon as Cheney.
Americans should reflect on Ryan’s performance in Thursday’s vice presidential debate with Cheney in mind. When they do, they will shudder.
In the 2000 vice presidential debate at Centre College in Kentucky, Cheney was asked if he favored using deadly force against Iraq. “We might have no other choice. We’ll have to see if that happens,” he replied. Why? He said he feared Saddam Hussein might have renewed his “capacity to build weapons of mass destruction.” “I certainly hope he’s not regenerating that kind of capability, but if he were, if in fact Saddam Hussein were taking steps to try to rebuild nuclear capability or weapons of mass destruction, you would have to give very serious consideration to military action to—to stop that activity.”
Two years later, Cheney was leading the drive to send US troops to invade Iraq. Three years later, US troops were bogged down in an occupation that would cost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. No weapons of mass destruction were found and America’s international credibility took a hard hit.
Cheney didn’t care. He never apologized for leading America astray. And he never offered any indication that he had learned from the experience.
Thursday, in the 2012 vice presidential debate at Centre College, Ryan put a smile on the Cheney doctrine. But there was not a sliver of difference between the politics of the former vice president and the pretender to the vice presidency on questions of how to deal with foreign policy challenges in Afghanistan, Syria and Iran.
At the close of an extended discussion of Afghanistan, in which he repeatedly suggested that the Obama administration was insufficiently committed to fighting America’s longest war, Ryan actually suggested: “We are already sending Americans to do the job, but fewer of them. That’s the whole problem.”
On Iran, Ryan was so bombastic that an incredulous Biden finally asked: “What are you—you’re going to go to war? Is that what you want to do?”
Ryan did not answer in the affirmative Thursday night in Danville.
Neither did Cheney twelve years ago in Danville.
But Cheney signaled his inclinations in the 2000 vice presidential debate. And Ryan has signaled his intentions this year—confirming that the neoconservative fantasy, despite having been discredited by experience, dies hard on the neocon fringe of the Grand Old Party.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, October 14, 2012
“He Kept Us Safe” Festival Of Falsehoods: Bush Ignored Repeated Warnings Of Terrorist Attack
During the festival of falsehood held by Republicans in Tampa two weeks ago, perhaps the very biggest lie emanated from the mouth of Jeb Bush, the Florida politician, entrepreneur, and potential heir to the GOP presidential dynasty.
“My brother, well” began Jeb, referring to former president George W. Bush, “I love my brother” — and then went on to add, more arguably: ” He is a man of integrity, courage and honor. And during incredibly challenging times, he kept us safe.”
That those words – “he kept us safe” – could be uttered in public about that leader is a testament to our national affliction of historical amnesia. The harsher truth, long known but now reiterated in a startling report on the New York Times op-ed page, is that the Bush administration’s “negligence” left us undefended against the disaster whose anniversary we will mark again today.
New documents uncovered by investigative journalist Kurt Eichenwald show that despite repeated, urgent warnings from intelligence officials about an impending Al Qaeda attack, Bush did nothing because his neoconservative advisers told him that the threats were merely a “ruse” and a distraction.
Recalling the evidence compiled by the 9/11 Commission – which Bush, his vice president Dick Cheney, his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and numerous other officials sought to stymie and mislead – it has been clear for years that they ignored many warnings about Al Qaeda.
Specifically, as Eichenwald points out in his op-ed report, CIA officials sought to warn Bush with a glaring headline in the famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” That memorandum represented the culmination of many months of attempts to awaken a somnolent White House to the impending threat of a terrorist attack.
None of that is news, although Republicans like Jeb Bush continue to behave as if the facts uncovered by the 9/11 Commission had never emerged.
But according to Eichenwald, he has seen still-classified documents that place the August 6 PDB in a new context – namely, the briefing papers preceding that date, which remain locked away:
While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.
On May 1, 2001, the CIA relayed a report to the White House about “a group presently in the United States” that was planning a terrorist attack. On June 22, the agency told Bush that the Al Qaeda strikes might be “imminent.”
A week later, the CIA answered neoconservative officials in the Bush administration who claimed that Osama bin Laden’s threats were a ruse to distract the United States from the real threat posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “The United States is not the target of a disinformation campaign” by bin Laden, wrote agency officials, citing evidence compiled by its analysts that the Al Qaeda threats were real.
The warnings continued and multiplied into July 2001, with counter-terrorism officials becoming increasingly alarmed – or as Eichenwald puts it, “apoplectic.” Still, Bush, Cheney, Rice and their coterie failed to act.
Familiar with Eichenwald’s career, I’m confident that he is reporting what he has seen with complete accuracy and due caution. A two-time winner of the George Polk Award and a Pulitzer finalist, he concludes carefully that we will never know whether a more alert administration could have mobilized to prevent 9/11. What we know for certain –that they didn’t bother – is an eternal indictment.
But Eichenwald’s report has relevance that is more than historical. Advising Mitt Romney, foreign policy neophyte, arethe same neoconservatives whose arrogance and incompetence steered Bush away from Al Qaeda and toward the quagmire in Iraq. Returning them to power would be exceptionally dangerous to the security of the United States and the world.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, September 11, 2012
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