“Domain Specific Intelligence”: The Truth About Ben Carson; Smart People Can Believe Crazy Things
The mystery of Ben Carson is that he’s a startlingly intelligent man with an inspiring life story who repeatedly makes unhinged assertions that are divorced from reality—and who, as we now know, unnecessarily embellishes his life story. About Carson’s braininess there can be no doubt: He’s not just a doctor, nor is he just a brain surgeon, he’s also performed astonishing medical breakthroughs. In 1987, he was the first surgeon to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head, not a feat that you can do unless you are extraordinarily talented. Yet Carson’s impressive medical accomplishments are puzzling in light of the many absurd things he’s said, notably that Charles Darwin was inspired by Satan and that the pyramids were created by the Hebrew slave Joseph to store grain (as against what Carson thinks is the belief of many “scientists” that they were created by space aliens).
There’s no gainsaying the undisputed facts of Carson’s life, which are genuinely elevating. He really did go from a ghetto childhood to Yale to medical school to being a world-class surgeon. Why then has Carson felt the need to gild the lily with apparently tall tales of being a violence-prone kid who nearly murdered a friend, and being offered a scholarship to West Point? Reporting by CNN and Politico has made it clear that these central claims in his autobiographical account of himself are almost surely false.
To solve the mystery of Ben Carson, it’s important to realize two facts: First, great intelligence doesn’t immunize a person from indulging in magical thinking or pseudo-science. Second, even very smart and accomplished people can be fantasists.
A key text for understanding the Carson phenomenon is science journalist Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Times (originally published in 1997 and revised in 2002). In a chapter titled “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things,” Shermer notes that “intelligence is … orthogonal to the variables that go into shaping beliefs.” What this means is that the factors that make someone believe unusual and non-scientific or pseudo-scientific ideas—everything ranging from ESP to myths about Atlantis to oddball Shakespearean authorship theories to outright holocaust denial—are independent of intelligence. These are beliefs that very smart people as well as the far less intellectually gifted are prone to.
“Another problem is that smart people might be smart in only one field,” Shermer notes. “We say that their intelligence is domain specific.” Carson clearly has a “domain-specific” intelligence—which he freely applies to fields outside his ken (not just Egyptian Archaeology but also American politics, foreign policy, economics, evolutionary biology, and many others).
But there’s a further factor at work: In our educational meritocracy, smart people like Carson are likely to have high social status, which makes them more self-assured and willing to think they are smarter than the experts in other fields. Or smart enough, in Carson’s case, to believe they’re qualified for the presidency.
In some respects, being as intelligent and well-educated as Carson makes you more vulnerable to what Shermer calls weird beliefs. The smarter and better-educated you are, the more powerful you are at coming up with arguments to justify your positions. In effect, intelligence and education give you the skills at becoming entrenched in motivated reasonings. In Shermer’s words, “smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending belief they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” This explains the engineers who become 9/11 truthers, the Supreme Court justices who think the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays, the distinguished mathematicians who think HIV is not the cause of AIDS. It also explains Ben Carson.
But aside from his proclivity toward weird ideas (often connected to his right-wing ideology), we now know that Carson is also a fantasist. His inspirational tales about his life seem to be filled with fibs, moments where he takes perhaps a kernel of truth and turns it into an outright untruth.
Here again, we have to recognize that intelligence and accomplishment are no guard against moral failings. Whatever qualities make someone into a fabulist—perhaps a love of powerful stories, perhaps an inability to distinguish between fact and fiction—can be found in the gifted as well as the ordinary. Two distinguished historical figures prefigure Carson in this regard: the novelist Ford Madox Ford and the political theorist Harold Laski. Ford wrote wonderful novels like The Good Soldier (1915), and Laski was a seminal figure in the Fabian movement, yet both inexplicably felt the need to spruce up their life stories. Ford was genuinely friends with figures like Joseph Conrad and Henry James, but made up stories about them in his autobiographical books. Laski was active in the heart of British politics, yet his letters and private conversations were filled with untrue stories about meeting famous people and doing extraordinary things.
Ben Carson is fast becoming a tragic figure. He’s a man of genuine merit, yet he’s tarnished his reputation through his inability to resist fantastic ideas—and to make up fantasies about his own life. He stands as proof of the fact that intelligence is unconnected to morality.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor at The New Republic; November9, 2015
“Stretching Facts To Fit His Preconceptions”: Only Softballs? Transcript Shows Trump Lied About Democratic Debate
By now you may have noticed that Donald Trump exists in his very own reality — a pleasing world where the Mexicans will pay us to build a border wall, where industrial nations will capitulate instantly to his trade demands, and where global climate change is merely a myth “created by and for the Chinese.” Lunatic as The Donald’s confident assertions often may be, not all of them are as easily debunked as certain remarks he made at today’s press conference in New York to introduce his new book.
Discussing the presidential debates, Trump complained more than once about the free ride that Hillary Clinton supposedly enjoyed at the last Democratic debate, which was televised by CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper. According to the real estate mogul, the questioning by Cooper and his colleagues “was very unfair because Hillary Clinton was given all softballs. They didn’t ask her one tough question! They didn’t talk about the foundation, they didn’t talk about the emails….She only got softballs, that’s all she got…Hillary had only softballs, all night long. ‘Here, Hillary, hit this one over the park.’”
That struck me as a pandering and distorted account of the debate — so I checked.
It is true that Cooper didn’t inquire about the Clinton Foundation, but the questions he did ask (reproduced below without Clinton’s answers, which can be found in the full transcript here) indicate just how far Trump is willing to stretch facts to fit his preconceptions. Not only did Cooper pose several tough questions to her, from the very beginning of the debate, but he seized every chance to pillory Hillary in framing questions he put to the other candidates. (And he did ask her — and the others — about the damned emails.)
Unlike the Republicans, she spared us the post-debate whining.
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, I want to start with you. Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency. You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the “gold standard”. Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it. Will you say anything to get elected?
COOPER [following up]: Secretary Clinton, though, with all due respect, the question is really about political expediency. Just in July, New Hampshire, you told the crowd you’d, quote, “take a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.” Last month in Ohio, you said you plead guilty to, quote, “being kind of moderate and center.” Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Russia, they’re challenging the U.S. in Syria. According to U.S. intelligence, they’ve lied about who they’re bombing. You spearheaded the reset with Russia. Did you underestimate the Russians, and as president, what would your response to Vladimir Putin be right now in Syria?
COOPER [to Martin O’Malley]: Secretary Clinton voted to authorize military force in Iraq, supported more troops in Afghanistan. As Secretary of State, she wanted to arm Syrian rebels and push for the bombing of Libya. Is she too quick to use military force?
COOPER [following up insistently]: Does she — does she want to use military force too rapidly?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, on the campaign trail, Governor [sic] Webb has said that he would never have used military force in Libya and that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was inevitable. Should you have seen that attack coming?
COOPER [following up]: But American citizens did lose their lives in Benghazi.
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, you are going to be testifying before Congress next week about your e-mails. For the last eight months, you haven’t been able to put this issue behind you. You dismissed it; you joked about it; you called it a mistake. What does that say about your ability to handle far more challenging crises as president?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Secretary Clinton, with all due respect, it’s a little hard — I mean, isn’t it a little bit hard to call this just a partisan issue? There’s an FBI investigation, and President Obama himself just two days ago said this is a legitimate issue.
COOPER [after Bernie Sanders dismissed the email controversy]: It’s obviously very popular in this crowd, and it’s — hold on.
(APPLAUSE) I know that plays well in this room. But I got to be honest, Governor Chafee, for the record, on the campaign trail, you’ve said a different thing [challenging Clinton’s ethics]. You said this is a huge issue. Standing here in front of Secretary Clinton, are you willing to say that to her face?
COOPER: Governor O’Malley, you expressed concern on the campaign trail that the Democratic Party is, and I quote, “being defined by Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.”You heard her answer, do you still feel that way tonight?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, how would you address this [income inequality] issue? In all candor, you and your husband are part of the one percent. How can you credibly represent the views of the middle class?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Governor O’Malley says the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth between two royal families. This year has been the year of the outsider in politics, just ask Bernie Sanders. Why should Democrats embrace an insider like yourself?
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 3, 2015
“A Lot More Than Two Sides”: Winning Isn’t Everything — Especially In Syria
An awful lot of people think about foreign relations the way they think about football. That is, they view the United States as the beloved home team perennially competing for victories in a season that never ends.
Trumpism, you might call it. To hear him talk, you’d think his followers’ personal prestige and happiness depended upon Team America being perennially ranked Number One.
The New York blowhard is far from alone. Lots of people are yelling: “Let’s you and him fight.”
Talking to a group of Gold Star Mothers recently, President Obama said, “Right now, if I was taking the advice of some of the members of Congress who holler all the time, we’d be in, like, seven wars right now. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve been counting.”
Challenged, a National Security Council spokesman listed seven places where Obama has sent combat forces: Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
Anybody who’s paying attention could add Iran, Ukraine, and the South China Sea. Sarah Palin wants troops sent to Lithuania and Estonia, although NATO just completed war games there. I’ve lost track of the countries John McCain and Lindsey Graham want to bomb.
So no, Obama wasn’t exaggerating.
“Nationalism,” Orwell wrote in 1945, “is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.” With the smoke still rising from Europe’s ruins, he distinguished militant nationalism from patriotism, or love of kin and country.
He saw it as a kind of moral and intellectual disease: “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”
Few are immune. Even normally sensible Washington thinkers are troubled by Obama’s disinclination to kick ass. Washington Post editorial page director Fred Hiatt concedes that “the next president will inherit an America in better shape—better positioned for world leadership—than the nation that George Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama.”
“So why doesn’t it feel that way? Why does it feel as if we’re losing?”
Brilliant New York Times’ columnist Roger Cohen is made deeply uneasy by what he calls the president’s Doctrine of Restraint. “Not since the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago” he frets “has Russia been as assertive or Washington as acquiescent.”
He concludes that “Obama has sold America short…Not every intervention is a slippery slope.”
“Syria,” Cohen thinks, “is the American sin of omission par excellence, a diabolical complement to the American sin of commission in Iraq — two nations now on the brink of becoming ex-nations.”
It’s a clever formulation, gracefully expressed. But what should Obama do? Cohen never really says. Is there any reason why Syria and Iraq should remain intact because Britain and France drew lines on a map to divide their spheres of influence 100 years ago?
Should the United States send ground troops to fight there? Against whom? In support of what? There are a lot more than two sides, you know. Spend a half hour pondering the interactive maps and charts on the New York Times website, and then tell me which should be our allies, and which our enemies.
OK, the Kurds. We’re already on their side, although our other allies, the Turks, continue to fight their own Kurdish separatists. Does anybody believe that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites can live together in peace?
The 2003 U.S. invasion that deposed strongman Saddam Hussein broke the country apart, and the fabled “Surge” so beloved of GOP pundits basically created ISIS. “Quit making us kill you, and take this money and these weapons,” Gen. Petraeus essentially told the remnants of Saddam’s army. “We’ll soon leave you to each other.”
As for Syria, University of Michigan Middle East expert Juan Cole explains that he has no dog in the fight: “I despise the al-Assad regime, which is genocidal and has engaged in mass torture. But I absolutely refuse to support any group allied with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s al-Qaeda or which envisions Syria as a hardline Salafi emirate where Christians, Alawites, Druze and Kurds (altogether maybe 40% of the population) as well as secular Sunni Arabs (another 45%) are second class citizens…. For the fundamentalists to conquer Alawite Latakia or the Druze regions would result in an enormous tragedy.”
“Fundamentalists” includes just about all the “moderate rebels” the Russians are bombing. Putin argues that even the Assad government beats no government, and represents the only hope of avoiding genocide.
Is he wrong just because he’s Russian and a cynic?
Yes, President Obama’s 2011 “red line” was a bad mistake. So were Secretary Clinton’s toothless pronouncements that Assad had to go.
But that was then. This is now.
Fareed Zakaria gets it right: “[I]f Russia and Iran win, somehow, against the odds, they get Syria — which is a cauldron, not a prize.”
And if the U.S. fights and wins? Same deal.
By: Gene Lyons, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 21, 2015
“Why Ben Carson’s Candidacy Is Doomed”: The More Attention He Gets, The Less Electable He’s Going To Look
Ben Carson ought to get ready, because things are about to get very difficult for him. In fact, we can probably start the clock on the demise of his presidential candidacy.
Okay, so that’s a little dramatic. But today we saw the first national poll, from the New York Times and CBS, that puts Carson in the lead in the Republican race. Yes, it’s only one poll, and yes, that lead is within the margin of error, meaning he may not actually be ahead (the poll averages still have him trailing Donald Trump by a few points). But he’s clearly leading in Iowa, and this poll will be taken as a cue for the press to give him more scrutiny than he’s gotten so far. Carson has been getting more media attention, but that focus will intensify now. And it won’t be good for him.
In a year in which outsiders are all the rage, Carson is the most outsidery of all. Ted Cruz is a U.S. senator who built his identity by hating the institution he’s a part of and everyone who’s in it — but he’s still a senator. Carly Fiorina is a former CEO — but she ran for office before and has been involved in politics for some time. Even Donald Trump is less of an outsider than Carson. He may be just as ignorant about policy, but there’s a surface plausibility to him being president. He runs a company, you can see him on TV ordering people around, and he’s got a plane with his name on it.
With each passing week, however, Carson has been gaining. All of his shocking statements on things like Muslims not being allowed to run for president unless they publicly disavow their religion, or Obamacare being the worst thing since slavery, or that the Jews might have stopped the Holocaust if they had more guns, only seem to have helped him win support for his campaign. But there’s a limit to everything.
As of now, Ben Carson’s actual plans for being president will get much more attention. And even Republicans may not be happy with all of what they hear.
Take, for example, Carson’s plan to shut down Medicare and Medicaid and replace them with health savings accounts. From a policy standpoint, it’s utterly daft. But it’s also about as politically unwise as you could imagine. Medicare is one of the two most beloved government programs there is. Even though Republicans would love to get rid of it (in part because its success stands as a constant rebuke to their belief that government can’t do anything right), they always insist that their plans to cut or transform it are really about “strengthening Medicare to make sure it’s there for future generations.” They know that saying anything other than that they love the program and want it to exist forever is somewhere between treacherous and suicidal.
That doesn’t stop Democrats from charging that Republicans want to destroy the program, an attack that usually works. And with Carson, there wouldn’t be any doubt — he does want to end Medicare.
What else does he want to do if he becomes president? His ideas are almost absurdly vague, a fact that will become more and more evident as he gets more attention. Go to the “Issues” section of his web site, and you’ll search in vain for anything resembling an actual proposal. When he is asked about particular policy issues, he tends to offer something so simplistic and divorced from reality that it often seems like it’s the first time he’s ever thought about it. How might he change the tax system? Well, how about a tithe, like in the Bible? (Or actually not like in the Bible, but never mind that.) How would that actually work? He doesn’t know, and barely seems to care.
Carson certainly checks off many of the standard Republican boxes: overturn Roe v. Wade, balanced budget amendment to the Constitution (as idiotic an idea as either party has ever produced, but that’s a topic for another day), show Russia who’s boss, more guns, and so on. But as he’s forced to talk more about a Carson presidency, he’s likely to get lots of negative coverage growing out of his own lack of understanding of government.
You see, the journalists covering Carson come from that same Washington world he finds so alien, and they’ll be drawn to talking about his unfamiliarity with it. This has nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism — someone like Ted Cruz, who’s every bit as conservative as Carson, can have a conversation about the presidency with reporters in which they’re all inhabiting the same planet. They can ask him a question about something like defense spending or Social Security or foreign policy, and while his answers might be oversimplified, they won’t make the reporters say, “Oh my god, did he just say what I think he said?”
You might reply that Donald Trump knows just as little as Carson, and also gives ridiculous answers to policy questions. But Trump’s ability to blow through those questions (“When I’m president, it’ll be terrific!”) is possible because his supporters don’t really care about the answers. They’re not party loyalists who are concerned with ideological fealty or electability.
But Carson’s support right now is centered on evangelicals and older Republicans, and they’re more pragmatic than you might think. Yes, they’ll support someone like Carson for a while — just as they gave Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee victories in Iowa — but that support isn’t permanent. Once other Republican candidates start going after Carson for wanting to eliminate Medicare (Donald Trump has already started), many of Carson’s voters are going to say, “Well that’s not going to go over too well,” and even, “I’m not sure I like that.” The more attention he gets, the less electable he’s going to look.
Am I being premature? Perhaps. Carson is so popular with evangelicals in part because they’ve known him for years (his autobiography is a common assignment in Christian home-school curricula everywhere). His combination of a calm, soothing manner and absolutely radical ideas has proven compelling to a healthy chunk of the Republican electorate. It’s entirely possible that he could sustain this support enough to win Iowa and then receive all the glowing coverage such a victory would produce. And the very fact that he’s doing as well as he is makes for a fascinating story. But it isn’t going to last.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, October 27, 2015
“An Unhinged Rant That Smacks Of Sedition”: Back To The Dark Side; Dick Cheney’s Pax Americana
Exceptional, the new book from former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, is not. It is nothing more than an unhinged rant that smacks of sedition.
“The children need to know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender,” the prologue proclaims. The book, however, is not about who we are but who Cheney wants us to become. It is a call for Americans to reject constitutional government and those values that have guided our nation for 227 years and replace it with imperial rule in the name of “freedom”––even when that rule includes wars of choice, intrusive violations of our privacy and civil liberties, and of course, an aggressive regime of torture.
This review assumes that Exceptional represents Dick Cheney’s ideas, and so we will refer to the author only in the singular. (To the extent the book reflects Liz’s original thinking, consider it a mind meld.)
Part One begins with Uncle Dick recounting how “the American Century” has been marked by a fight that he and a few other white-hatted cowboys have waged to keep the world safe for “freedom.” In Cheney’s telling, pro-war and wartime leaders were strong and “right,” and the others weak and feckless. World War II is reduced to: “We liberated millions and achieved the greatest victory in the history of mankind, for the good of all mankind. America––the exceptional nation––had become freedom’s defender.”
Manichean World View
In Cheney’s Manichean worldview, Truman was right to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and Eisenhower’s farewell speech was not a warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex as is commonly understood, but, rather, a strong endorsement of it. Reagan’s unwillingness to give up America’s right to missile defense (SDI) was “an exercise of diplomacy that should be studied by all future policy makers.” Obama’s foreign policy strategy is simply, “don’t do stupid stuff.”
Left out of Cheney’s idyllic tale of American exceptionalism in that era are such inconvenient freedom-defending events as the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 and the imposition of the oppressive Shah who ruled with an iron fist until his downfall in 1978; the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile, replaced by the military dictator, Pinochet; the Reagan administration’s support of the Contras in Central America in the 1980s; and the slavish support of African dictators like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko.
Cheney conflates the Gulf War, conducted when he was George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, with the Iraq War (“We were right in 1991 and we were right in 2003.”) but without noting important differences. The Gulf War was a true coalition off the willing, with 32 nations contributing forces operating under the authority of the United Nations and very specific Security Council resolutions, and the rest of the world paying 90 percent of the war’s costs. At its conclusion, the United States was at the pinnacle of its power, which it used to advance the cause of conflict resolution in the region. By contrast, the Iraq War was essentially a United States operation to remove Saddam with limited support, no U.N. resolution, and the entire cost borne by the United States. The consequences are abundantly clear: the region is in chaos, overrun by the same brutal terrorists and radical forces that the Cheney doctrine was supposed to eliminate.
Cheney’s selective memory is again on display as he recounts the events surrounding 9/11. Absent are the infamous CIA memo of August 2001,“Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” the reports of missed signals such as suspicious pilot training, and the fact that the CIA was on the highest possible alert while Bush was cutting brush in Texas and Cheney fishing in Wyoming.
The recounting of the war on Afghanistan is rich in bravado (“we have to work the dark side”) and ultimatums (“the Taliban will turn over the terrorists or share their fate”), but poor on facts. Cheney omits the meeting at Camp David where Paul Wolfowitz kept turning the conversation from Afghanistan to Iraq; the directive Bush gave to Richard Clarke to go back and find some link between 9/11 and Saddam; and Donald Rumsfeld’s observation that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq. There is no discussion of the pivot to Iraq just when we were on the verge of finding Bin Laden.
Defending Torture
Cheney then turns to a vigorous defense of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the torture policies he championed. Rather than share with the reader the influence he and his key staffers exerted on the decision-making process, Cheney instead recounts the statements of Democrats who voted to support the war, spreading the blame. He neglects to mention the massive propaganda operation directed by the White House or the fact that the whole case was built on lies. Other omissions: Yellowcake, aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapon labs, 9/11 attacker Atta’s supposed meeting with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, and intelligence conclusions cooked up in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans and foisted on Colin Powell by Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby for presentation to the United Nations. Instead, “History will be the ultimate judge of our decision to liberate Iraq,” Cheney tells us, “and it is important for future decision makers that those debates be based on facts.” But only those facts he cares to share.
Smearing Obama
By the end of Part One Cheney has fully transitioned from defender of the indefensible to bare-knuckled attacker of President Obama. The Cheney snarl is on full display as he engages in an extended personal smear, complete with dog-whistle comments questioning the president’s patriotism and allegiance. The tirade is a new low, even for those of us who have personally experienced the depths to which Cheney will go to destroy an adversary. The opening paragraph of Part Two says it all: “The . . . level of self-regard was apparent, as was his underlying belief that America had played a malign role in the the world . . . . He [Obama] assessed the last fifty years of American foreign policy through the lens of Indonesia, a nation he called ‘the land of my childhood.’”
“Where some see an exceptional nation, unmatched in the history of the world in our goodness and our greatness, in our contributions to global freedom, justice and peace,” Cheney writes, “Barack Obama sees a nation with at best a ‘mixed’ record.”
Cheney combs the record for every quote and factoid that might be used to undermine the authority and legitimacy of the administration. Former senior intelligence officials are selectively quoted to criticize President Obama’s decision to end the torture program. Cheney would have us believe that
Ending programs that kept us safe, revealing the details about those programs to the terrorists, and spreading untruths about our policies was misguided, unjust, and highly irresponsible. . . . President Obama, having so consistently distorted the truth about the enhanced interrogation program and the brave Americans who carried it out, is in no position to lecture anyone about American values.
The personal attacks are unremitting and obnoxious, but they have a purpose: to whip up resentment, hatred, and every other base emotional reaction that makes civil discourse impossible. It is sedition, plain and clear.
One example is the Benghazi tragedy, where Cheney cannot resist offering his own interpretation: “At the most fundamental level it is the difference between being honest about what happened in Benghazi . . . and adopting a false narrative because it serves political purposes. It is the difference between lying to the American people and dealing with them truthfully—which is what we deserve.” The irony drips from the words.
Cheney saves his harshest attack for the Iran nuclear deal, flatly accusing the president of lying to the American people. The most comprehensive arms control deal with the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated, it is a deal not just between the United States and Iran but between the world and Iran, unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council and lauded by nuclear arms specialists worldwide. To Cheney it is presidential “falsehoods.”
After concluding “In the seventy years since World War II, no American president has done more damage to our nation’s defenses than Barack Obama,” Cheney’s solution to Obama’s perfidy is simple but profoundly disturbing: return to the past failed policies. He advocates massive additional infusions of money to the Pentagon, abandonment of key agreements, further attacks on civil liberties, and imposition of an American Diktat on the rest of the world, by force of arms if necessary. It is difficult to imagine a more ill-advised approach to American national security or international relations.
Exceptional deserves to be dismissed and ignored, except that to ignore it is to risk that the subversive ideas therein actually gain some currency, if left unchallenged. They are an affront to our history, to our values, to our culture, and must be fought.
By: Ambassador Joe Wilson (ret) and Valerie Plame, The National Memo, October 26, 2015: This book review originally appeared in The Washington Spectator
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