78 of 82 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read, January 17, 2007
This review is from: Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (Hardcover)
Whether you believe Dick Cheney is trying to protect our country by "fighting terrorism" or is simply unhinged by hubris (and perhaps ill health), you need to read this book. Don't be swayed by terms like "Torture Presidency" or "Lady MacCheney". Yes, the book has bias, but its reporting is too thorough for dismissal as a partisan hack job.
Anecdotal evidence suggests his influence is banking. Yet he bestrides this administration like a Claude Raines villain in an old Warners adventure movie, a guardian-chamberlain dominating Dubya, the cocksure, brittle dauphin on the throne. Fellow reviewer Robert D. Steele says Cheney should be placed in irons, and presents persuasive evidence crystallizing the themes of the book.
Vice documents how Dick Cheney and his long-time counsel David Addington have put into action an authoritarian "unitary executive" theory to give the president unwarranted powers, and have arrogated these powers to the vice president's office, accountable to no one.
It's all here: torture, signing statements, shadow governance in "the dark side, if you will," as Cheney puts it, eavesdropping on the White House staff, the lies leading to the Iraq War, the wiretapping, the secret energy task force, sweetheart Halliburton contracts, the failure - almost surely deliberate - to reconstitute Congress in prospective post-attack plans. The 25 questions for Dick Cheney at the end (page 225 or thereabouts) should be at the top of Congress's list if and when Cheney and Addington get their subpoenas.
At the the same time, the book raises as many questions as it answers, largely due to the authors' lack of access, a largely absent paper trail (a tip learned from Cheney's mentor Don Rumsfeld) and the secretive nature of this enigmatic American version of Yuri Andropov. (An aside: The handling of the Texas hunting accident and subsequent reassignment of all the Secret Service agents had touches of Kremlin black comedy).
The book raises, but cannot answer, Cheney's evident shift from an extreme, but pragmatic, right-wing Republican who said Saddam Hussein's downfall was not worth "very damn many" American lives, to the rigid, hell-bent-for-war authoritarian ideologue we see today. (Is it 9-11? Partly. The heart attacks? Perhaps. Cheney's onetime friends are baffled. But the authors can only raise the questions.)
So, if the final book has yet to be written, this one gives us a useful map. The surprise is that it has not received more notice; it is on par with - and in some ways superior to - the recent works of Suskind, Ricks, Isikoff, Woodward, Rich and Chandrasekaran, among others, who have tried to shed light on this administration's apparently endless dark corners.
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...the right-wingers would have definitely impeached him. They would have cried out that the Patriot Act was a blatant attack against our civil rights granted in the U.S. Constitution (which it is) and claimed that Gore had lied (which is what Democrats do, according to right-wingers) and sent him packing immediately. However, I believe that too many individuals follow party lines regardless of policies. Look at the number of Democrats that support Bill Clinton - a man who signed NAFTA and a trade agreement with China. Under Clinton, the gap between the rich and poor became wider, and corporate crime prosecution went down. Clinton gave us small government with fewer regulations. Democrats are attacking George W. Bush for engaging in the same right-wing policies supported by the Clinton administration.
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