Adam Serwer explains how Dick Cheney plays a convenient foil to Barack Obama:
According to John Bolton, the conservative magazine Human Events chose Dick Cheney as its “conservative of the year” because of his “persuasive positions on substantive policy matters.” In fact, Cheney was chosen for his ability to effectively manipulate American fear to defend the lawlessness of the prior administration. In a year when the GOP has tried to ride a wave of understandable but wrongheaded populist anger and anxiety over rising deficits, it chose as its figurehead a conservative who thinks deficits don’t matter and whose crowning achievement is making torture a central part of the Republican platform.
Over the past year, the press has delighted in pitting President Barack Obama and Dick Cheney against one another. Events like their dueling national security speeches in May at the National Archives and the American Enterprise Institute, respectively, seemed to provide a chance to contrast the current administration and the previous one. Jon Meacham of Newsweek argued Cheney should run for president because a contest between Cheney and Obama “would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions.” In fact, the heated tone of Cheney’s criticisms masks the substantial overlap between the prior administration and this one when it comes to national security.
