Cheney: Good Monster, Bad Monster

From Tom Tomorrow via many others, we have the story which has popped up at various places on the net these past few days, of Dick Cheney's 1994 television interview in which he warned that invading Iraq would be a foolish and self-destructive move. Tomorrow links to the video and also to a transcript, for the benefit of those who are still in the dark ages of dialing-up.

Now everybody knows that Dick Cheney is Frankenstein's monster. But back in 1994, he was not yet the large, bad Frankenstein's monster, i.e., the red, rectangular one.

Back then he was the small, good monster. You know, the round, blue Frankenstein's monster.

But all seriousness aside, he was also Secretary of Defense under Bush I until January, 1993. Speaking as George Herbert Walker Bush's Secretary of Defense, I'm sure that even after Clinton became president, Cheney would still have felt obligated to be a good "team player," and echo the official line of the Bush I crew on Iraq.

What he said on the videotape was pretty much a carbon copy of a passage explaining the coitus interruptus of our initial penetration of the oil-bearing plum called Iraq in the senior Bush's memoir of his term in the White House.

I don't remember the name of the book, but I heard Andy Rooney read the relevant passage on his 60 Minutes segment shortly after the current war went south, and what Cheney was saying in '94 sounds just like what's in the book.

These guys always follow the script, unless they're writing it, which unfortunately is what Cheney is doing now -- writing the script for his somewhat literacy-challenged immediate superior.