Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney and If You Happen To Be Lucky And Catch One Of Cheney’s Book Signings, Bring Along A Pair Of Handcuffs.

Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney and If You Happen To Be Lucky And Catch One Of Cheney’s Book Signings, Bring Along A Pair Of Handcuffs.

 

If You Happen To Be Lucky And Catch One Of Cheney’s Book Signings, Bring Along A Pair Of Handcuffs. Dick Cheney's Wars: The Former Vice President on 9/11, Iraq and the Future Wall Street Journal Following are excerpts from former Vice President Dick Cheney's new memoir, "In My Time," published by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. In the first excerpt, Mr. Cheney describes his advice to President George W. Bush shortly ...See all stories on this topic » Mr. Cheney describes the path that led to "enhanced interrogation" of terror detainees and the results of the controversial program: Inside the mind of Dick Cheney. Last week, as morsels of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s new memoir began to go public, The New York Times published an odd revelation: After undergoing heart surgery in 2010, Cheney had “a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.” Lacking any additional context, the scene seemed rather opaque. What could it possibly mean? I decided to call up some psychoanalysts and dream experts for their interpretations. While all the analysts took pains to note they couldn’t be sure, they nonetheless provided me with several possible meanings for Cheney’s bizarre and extended dream. The first two experts with whom I spoke were struck by the quotidian character of Cheney’s vision. French psychiatrist Mathilde Kazes, who practices medicine in Paris, offered that “it might mean that Cheney would like to be like a regular guy, with the little twist of living in an Italian villa—far from U.S. politics? With Berlusconi?” Dr. Paula Ellman, director of the Psychoanalytic Training Institute of the New York Freudian Society, agreed with the majority of Kazes’s diagnosis. For her, Cheney’s dream is “lifeless, concrete, [and] devoid of rich symbols.” It might reveal “his desires to have a life of ease, with its ordinary, mundane pleasures.” Dr. Benjamin Kilborne, a medical doctor, anthropologist, and expert on dreams noted that the most obvious emotional content of the dream is located in Cheney’s wanderings on stone paths. “It may be a manifestation of some sort of anxiety or impatience,” he told me. “Why would he be pacing? Is it because he can’t go somewhere? Is he waiting for someone?” Kilborne added that the dream’s setting in Italy was also curious. In light of Cheney’s actions in the executive branch, he ventured that “it’s possible that he had fantasies of Roman triumphs.” Dr. Janice Quinn, a Jungian psychologist, gravitated towards a very different position. Having worked with high ranking military and government leaders, she saw many parallels to Cheney’s case. For instance, important officials often feel a professional imperative to keep their passions under wraps, she told me. “They aren’t allowed to have any feelings that could lead them astray.” But occasionally, a vivid dream can force them to reevaluate their monochrome mental approach. “They wake up,” she says. “It’s like, look, there is more to you than just this one-sided consciousness you work with.” The exotic location of the dream gave Quinn a valuable interpretive key. “The Italians are very extroverted, feeling-oriented people. ... In Jungian terms, we would say that the Italian villa could represent the ‘feeling side’ of Cheney’s personality.” After eight stressful years in the public eye and a dangerous heart surgery, it’s possible that Cheney’s unusual dream just might have freed up some pent-up feelings. But was Cheney’s hospital bed vision truly transformative? Dr. Melanie Starr Costello, a Jungian analyst in private practice in D.C., told me that it isn’t altogether unlikely. The combination of “disease and dreams” often precipitates a personal transformation, she says. “In times of crisis, we have dreams that seem intended to help us digest what’s going on and to provide some needed salve or insight into the experience.” Despite their differing opinions, most of the experts and practitioners to whom I spoke were able to agree, at least, about one thing: Cheney’s dream may have possessed real significance. “If it was so vivid to him,” says Dr. Quinn, “it means it has some deep meaning.” But at the end of the day, there is only one way to get to the bottom of it: Cheney has to sit down with a trained specialist and discuss. Dr. Quinn, in particular, told me she’d be happy to help the former vice president. All he has to do is call and make an appointment. Jarad Vary is an intern at The New Republic. I Think The Shrinks Are Nuts! DICK CHENEY'S MEMOIR: How To Think (And Satirize) Like A Cartoonist Washington Post (blog) By Michael Cavna If you are the Post's reviewer Robert Kaiser, and you have a couple-dozen fat paragraphs with which to register your disdain and disappointment over Dick Cheney's new memoir, you can plot your verbal takedown like a relatively extended ...See all stories on this topic » Cheney Says He Urged Bush to Bomb Syria in ’07 Dick Cheney Book 'In My Time': The Biggest Revelations From The ... By The Huffington Post News Editors Dick Cheney's new memoir, which officially hits bookstores August 30, reveals new details about the inner workings of the Bush administration and Cheney's life as vice president. In an interview with NBC's Jamie Gangel, Cheney says "There ...The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com Be Scared: Dick Cheney’s Memoir Due in August America's most huggable teddy bear, Dick Cheney, has been working on his memoirs from his CIA-bunker house ever since leaving office. It should have been on bookstore shelves for a year or so by now, former vice president's rather serious heart problems got in the way. But now that's all over! In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir will hit shelves on August 30, so grab your sleeping bags and head over to the nearest bookstore entrance now. Cheney's book is co-written by his clone daughter Liz, who tells the Associated Press that In My Time shows off her father's "sense of storytelling and sense of humor." Yikes! Did you hear the one about the guy hanging from his thumbs in an isolated prison cell in Cuba? He ate— well, we'll let Dick finish this one, but it's a classic. 10 Reasons to Move Cheney's Book to the Crime Section by Medea ... By Medea Benjamin Former Vice President Dick Cheney was given a multi-million-dollar contract to write a book about his political career. According to Cheney's media hype, the book, called In My Time, will have “heads exploding all over Washington.” The Darth ...Antiwar.com Original Former Vice President Dick Cheney was given a multi-million-dollar contract to write a book about his political career. According to Cheney’s media hype, the book, calledIn My Time, will have “heads exploding all over Washington.” The Darth Vader of the Bush administration offers no apologies and feels no remorse. But peace activists around the country are stealthily gearing up to visit bookstores, grab a stack of books, and deposit them where they belong — the crime section. Here are 10 of Cheney’s many offenses to inspire you to move Cheney’s book and to insert these bookmarks explaining why the author of In My Time should be doing time. 1. Cheney lied; Iraqis and U.S. soldiers died. As vice president, Cheney lied about (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) ties to the 9/11 attack as a way to justify a war with a country that never attacked us. Thanks to Cheney and company, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 American soldiers perished in a war that should never have been fought. 2. Committing war crimes in Iraq. During the course of the Iraq war, the Bush-Cheney administration violated the Geneva Conventions by targeting civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances and by using illegal weapons, including white phosphorus, depleted uranium, and a new type of napalm. 3. War profiteering. U.S. taxpayers shelled out about $3 trillion for the Bush-Cheney wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — a major factor in our nation’s present economic meltdown. But Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton made out like bandits, getting billions in contracts for everything from feeding troops in Iraq to constructing the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan to building the infamous Guantanamo prison. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995-2000, leaving for the VP position with a $20 million retirement package, plus millions in stock options and deferred salary. Before the Iraq War began, Halliburton was 19th on the U.S. Army’s list of top contractors; with Cheney’s help, by 2003 it was number one — increasing the value of Cheney’s stocks by over 3,000 percent. 4. Violating basic rights. Cheney shares responsibility for holding thousands of prisoners without charges and without the fundamental right to the writ of habeas corpus, and for keeping prisoners hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross. He sanctioned kidnapping people and simply rendering them to secret overseas prisons. His authorization of the arbitrary detention of Americans, legal residents, and non-Americans — without due process, without charges, and without access to counsel — was in gross violation of U.S. and international law. A fan of indefinite detention in Guantanamo, Cheney writes in his book that he has been “happy to note” that President Obama failed to honor his pledge to close the Guantánamo prison. 5. Advocating torture. Cheney was a prime mover behind the Bush administration’s decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military by supporting “enhanced interrogation techniques.” This led to hundreds of documented cases in Iraq and Afghanistan of abuse, torture, and homicide. The torture included the practice known as “waterboarding,” a form of simulated drowning. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were tried and convicted of war crimes in U.S. courts for waterboarding. The sanctioning of abuses from the top trickled down, as the whole world saw in the photos from Abu Ghraib, becoming a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and sullying the reputation of our nation. 6. Trying to prolong the Afghan war. Not content with the damage he caused as VP, Cheney continues to encourage more grist for the war machine. In his book, he criticizes President Obama’s decision to withdraw, by September 2012, the 33,000 additional troops Obama sent to Afghanistan in 2009. He has also cautioned Obama not to pull out all the troops from Afghanistan at the planned date of 2014. “I don’t think we need to run for the exits,” he told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. 7. Abusing executive privilege. Cheney used executive privilege to refuse to comply with over a dozen congressional subpoenas related to improper firing of federal attorneys, torture, election violations, and exposing — for political retribution — the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative working on WMD proliferation. 8. Spying on us. Cheney was the mastermind behind the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program that spied on thousands, perhaps millions, of American citizens on American soil. This massive government interference with personal phone calls and emails was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Federal Telecommunications Act, and 4th Amendment of the Constitution. 9. Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. When Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the company skirted the law against investing in Iran by using a phony offshore subsidiary. Once VP, however, Cheney advocated bombing Iran. “I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues,” Cheney said in response to questions about whether the Bush administration should have launched a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities prior to handing over the White House to Barack Obama. Cheney thinks Obama is too soft on Iran, and he has said that the only way for diplomacy with Iran to work is if Obama also threatens to bomb the country. Negotiations are “bound to fail unless we are perceived as very credible” in threatening military action against Iran, he said. It seems that wars with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, plus drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen, are not enough to satisfy Cheney’s war addiction. But wait, there’s more… 10. Favored bombing Syria — and North Korea — instead of negotiating. One of the key anecdotes in Cheney’s memoir is his recollection of a session with the National Security Council in 2007, when he advised Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site. “After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.” Luckily, Cheney’s advice was dismissed in favor of a diplomatic approach (although the Israelis bombed the site in September 2007). As for North Korea, in his book, Cheney calls former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice naive for trying to forge a nuclear weapons agreement with North Korea. Enough? Since President Obama is not interested in holding Cheney accountable, the least we can do is to show our disgust by dumping his books in the crime section and inserting this bookmark. And if you happen to be lucky and catch one of Cheney’s book signings, bring along a pair of handcuffs. Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney On 9/11, Rumsfeld Fiddled While Cheney Ran the Country Powell Says Cheney Book Full Of 'Cheap Shots' A visibly angry Colin Powell used an appearance on CBS' Face the Nationon Sunday to blast former Vice President Dick Cheney for using "cheap shots" and "barbs" to drive up sales of his new memoir, which accuses Powell of trying to undermine President Bush during the run-up to the Iraq War and tacitly allowing his deputy to leak the name of a covert CIA agent. Powell, who had a rocky tenure as Bush's first secretary of State, said that the allegations in Cheney's book were better suited to "supermarket tabloids" than the memoir of a former vice president of the United States. He said Cheney was using misleading anecdotes and unfounded personal attacks to "pump up" sales of the memoir, In My Time, which will be officially released on Tuesday. Multiple media outlets have published excerpts from the book in recent days. "They are cheap shots," Powell told CBS' Bob Schieffer. "It's not necessary to take these kinds of barbs." Dick Cheney’s Final Sadism Of all of Cheney’s various crimes and corrosive acts, his book may be the cruelest. Not because of its dubious authenticity. Rather, Cheney gives new leases of life to mealy-mouthed Colin Powell and the entire spineless cavalcade of our past. Across D.C. one can’t escape General Jello’s plaintive, salad fork-like rebuttal. Again we are forced to endure the spectacle of a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and alleged warriorwhining about ‘cheap shots’ — as if he’s in the NBA working refs after getting dunked on. A patent lawyer almost wholly oblivious of anything political couldn’t shut up about seeing Colin Powell on TV. Now that’s evil. Curse you again, Dick Cheney. It’s Cheney’s misfortune that books themselves mean so little in 2011. As a cultural artifact they no longer command and monopolize the Imperial City hive mind. Not in the way say the former court reporter (in all senses of the words) Woodward’s routinely used to. Certainly not in the way Kissinger’s ghost written memoirs did. In fact, as Palin showed, a few well placed tweets command as much media spotlight. We draw comfort in our assessment because the kids at the WaPo disagree: The difference between all these books and Cheney’s is the author. While the books listed above were often written by staffers and sometimes by political appointees, Cheney is a former Vice President of the United States. That gives his autobiography a certain amount of heft lacking from the others. We doubt it. Not just because the WaPo is itself so enfeebled. Cheney, no matter how malefic, can not repeal the Law of Commodification. Already his book has been read, reported on. Thousands have fed its contents into the Twitter, StumbleUpon and other disposals of the modern intellect. Sliced, diced and churned. We doubt there are significant new details remaining that haven’t already been reported whether on Iraq, torture, Wilson/Plame, Rumsfeld, Afghanistan or domestic spying. Cheney can count on the AEI/Hudson networks for a certain annuity. But his publishers want sales and Cheney clearly relishes attention. So both need Tenet, Rice, Leahy and others rise to the bait (“heads will explode”). Thus is the full scope of Cheney’s sadism revealed. He is like the manipulator from the Saw movies. He opens a path to escape if the victims immolate themselves. Our only hope is they show the good judgment, courage and fortitude that evaded them when in office and spurn the invitation. General Jello already failed. And for us, once again, we are forced to recall the bitter taste of pinning expectations on such a sorry bunch of self-serving mediocrities. We can in a way slightly sympathize with Cheney’s contempt for them all. CURSE YOU INDEED, DICK CHENEY. About Bush The Man, Cheney Has Nothing To Say. Nothing About His Struggle With Alcoholism, His Troubled Relationship With His Father, His Extensive Record Of Two Terms As Governor Of Texas, Or His Efforts To Define A "Compassionate Conservatism." Such Irrelevant Details Do Not Interest Cheney Who Focuses Relentlessly On Power.