Joan Walsh inflates Dick Cheney to mythical status:
It's easy to say this is good news for Democrats. It certainly seems as if Cheney won't be happy until there are two people left in the Republican Party, him and Rush Limbaugh. Gen. Powell? Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. But I also think what Cheney's doing has disturbing political consequences, for the Obama administration and for the country. I'm also starting to worry Obama is internalizing Cheney's values, with a string of bad decisions on torture, culminating in today's move to reverse his prior commitment to transparency and block the release of more torture photos.
I think progressive dislike of Dick Cheney has reached a point where jokes about him being evil have seeped into straightforward political discourse. People joke about Darth Cheney, but now we're wondering if Obama is under the influence of his Sith mind trick. This line of argument also grants Obama far more innocence than he deserves. Cheney isn't "influencing" Obama on his torture decisions, the administration has registered contempt for Cheney publicly on more than one occasion.
The decisions Obama has made in this arena have all been attempts to preserve some of the extraordinary executive power asserted by the Bush administration, but we shouldn't be surprised: what politician willingly gives up power he's inherited? We should have been cautiously expecting the Obama administration to take this course, absent enormous levels of political and public pressure. Moreover, the refusal to release the torture photos strikes me as straightforward political calculation--the administration is trying to avoid losing control of the media narrative again. The torture memos talked about torture in the abstract, but I suspect that public opinion supporting torture would brittle somewhat in the face of photographic documentation, that such evidence would indeed "shock the conscience" of many people who are, as of now, able to rationalize what was done. The pressure for accountability would only grow, something the administration wants to avoid.
The results may be the same, but the impetus is different--the Bush administration was trying to cover up evidence of their crimes, the Obama administration is trying to focus public debate on what they wanted it to be focused on. There's so much straightforward self-interest involved here that I don't see how Cheney gets the credit.
UPDATE: TNC apparently got here first.
-- A. Serwer
