Vice President Cheney

I just read the Washington post series of articles about Vice President Cheney. It was very enlightening.

Cheney deserves some credit for piercing through and working around the bureaucratic static that has rendered prior VPs virtually ineffective. He would probably be a valuable asset to a stronger and more intelligent president.

I strongly oppose Cheney's pro-big business agenda. Government policies should serve to improve life for all of us, not for just a few obscenely wealthy CEOs.

But it is all too easy for us to criticize Cheney. His critics harp incessantly about what we should NOT be doing. But few have the courage to spell out specific alternatives, and to explain how those alternatives would produce better outcomes. They seem to concentrate more on winning an election than on real problem solving.

My friend, Bruce, commented that "It may have nothing to do with courage. There may not be a clear alternitive to a course of action or a policy. But if one course of action or policy is seen and understood to be catastrophic, it is very important to say so. If you saw conditions on a train bridge that you understood would cause the bridge to fall down when the next train passed over it, it would be your responsibility to say so, even if you had no clear way of fixing the bridge. First and most important would be to prevent a wreck."

While I agree with Bruce, those are two very important conditions: (1) impending catastrophe, and (2) no clear alternatives. I can see how some topics can be viewed, and are viewed by many, as meeting both conditions. But I don't believe that ALL of these issues meet BOTH tests:

Health care
Government debt
Equitable taxation
Iraq war
Terrorist actions
Illegal immigration
Abortion
Stem cell research
Eminent domain
Global warming
Oil depletion
Air and water pollution
Corruption in Legislative Branch
Corruption in Executive Branch


Some politicians seem to view virtually everything as an impending disaster. They complain and complain that everything in life is terrible, and that the only solution is to "shoot the tsars." Just as in Orwell's animal farm, once these critics get the power, they abuse it as much or more than the tsars did.

By the way, once one has stopped a train, one must be prepared to deal with the foreseeable consequences of that action: getting the passengers, mail and freight to their destinations, dealing with the losses from missed meetings and delayed shipments, repairing the bridge, determining the cause of the bridge collapse, and finding ways of reducing the chance of another collapse, etc, etc. Also important, one must be convinced that stopping the train will not cause an outcome even more horrible than the train crash.

Fear is a frequent companion of the lust for power. Most solutions to a problem will be imperfect--they will have pros and cons. Fear that the cons of a specific proposal will lose him votes keeps a politician from making the proposal. And the politician assumes that the voters are both less informed and less intelligent than he is. So he finds it easier and more colorful to launch an ad hominum attack.