'So?': Why should we listen to Dick Cheney?

A pretty good case could be made for ignoring the crooked-mouthed mutterings of Vice President Dick Cheney, the lame quail hunter of the lame-duck Bush administration.

A year ago, remember, he reaffirmed his rapid descent into self-parody by claiming that vice presidents aren't part of the executive branch of government. Some three years ago, Cheney's already-demolished credibility was the theme of a column I wrote charting a few of his recurring misstatements, including a couple of things he kept claiming he never said - despite videos showing him saying them.

So, life being short, there seems little reason to fritter away any of it by paying attention to a credibility-challenged caricature in an administration waddling toward Jan. 20, 2009.

Except that last week, there was Cheney galumphing around the Middle East, press entourage in tow, on a charm offensive with heads of state, most of whom have had it up to here already with Bush/Cheney's America. And except that there's Cheney making public pronouncements about American policy - and making a mess of things.

A week ago, Cheney sat down for an interview with veteran ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz at the Shangri-La's Barr al-Jissah Resort & Spa in Muscat, Oman. To the extent that the interview drew any attention, it was for this exchange:
Raddatz: "Two-thirds of Americans say it's (the Iraq war) not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gained versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives."

Cheney: "So?"

Raddatz: "So, you don't care what the American people think?"

Cheney: "No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls."

Almost immediately, lefties lit into Cheney, accusing him of expressing contempt for the opinions of the American people. Having watched the video several times, I think the accusation is unfair.

Not that Cheney isn't contemptuous of opinions different from his own, domestic and foreign. But in this instance, "So?" clearly was Cheney's way of asking Raddatz to come up with question after the statement about public opinion. And "No" was his abbreviated way of saying, "No, that's not what I mean." (However, his subsequent comparison of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq to Abraham Lincoln's approach to the Civil War makes you wonder if Cheney lingered a little too long at the hookah bar before talking with Raddatz.)

In any case, the problem wasn't what Cheney said to Raddatz about public opinion; it was, as usual, his distortion of facts:
"Fluctuations in the public opinion polls"? Nonsense.

Five years ago, most Americans - including me - accepted the Bush administration's flat declarations that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, was close to getting nuclear weapons and might be inclined to share all of them with al-Qaeda terrorists with which it had ongoing relationships. According to opinion surveys taken by the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of Americans at the time thought going to war was the right decision, and 22 percent disagreed.

Today, we know Saddam had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and no meaningful links to al-Qaeda. When Pew queried Americans at the end of February, only 38 percent of us said war had been the right decision; 54 percent said it had been wrong.

Allowing for a little month-to-month variation, the trend of the five-year timeline is steady and consistent. As it has become clearer and clearer that Saddam posed no real threat to the United States, and as the war has dragged on longer than America's participation in World War II, we have grown more and more convinced that Bush's decision to start the war was wrong.

Cheney can disregard this fact, of course, but to characterize American public opinion as "fluctuating" - as if our opinions were flighty, whimsical things bouncing along on waves of impulse - is dismissive and demeaning. And thoroughly Cheney-esque.

Of course, the vice president's thoughts on the Iraq escapade have long since been set in plaque; that he clings to them is hardly surprising. His comments on the causes of this country's more immediate economic distress, on the other hand, which received almost no attention, were every bit as detached from reality:
Raddatz: "What happened to cause this?"

Cheney: "Well, I think it's a normal part of the cycle. Maybe we had a housing bubble ... or the development of the subprime mortgage market, where a lot of people bought mortgages expecting they'd be able to pay that low rate of interest for a long period of time, when in fact it provided for the rates of interest to go up. And then they weren't able to pay those rates once those adjustments had been made."

It might be ideologically convenient to blame lunkheaded American consumers for the thrashing chaos in world financial markets. But Cheney fails even to acknowledge the existence of the Wall Street investment banking sharpies who invented new ways to collect real mortgages of real people on real property and then slice, dice and repackage them into so much financial coleslaw that when a crunch came, nobody could figure out what was real and had value and what was illusion. Hence, the Panic in Investment Park.

Let's give the last word on the American people and their opinions to White House press secretary Dana Perino. When Cheney's "So?" in Oman was misinterpreted, it fell to Perino back in Washington the following day to do damage control. Perino explained that Bush is determined to do what he believes is necessary for the good of the country, regardless of what other Americans might think or what opinion surveys might indicate:

Columnist Helen Thomas: "The American people are being asked to die and pay for this, and you're saying they have no say in this war?"

Perino: "No, I didn't say that, Helen."

Thomas: "Well, it amounts to you saying we have no input at all."

Perino: "No, the - you had input. The American people have input every four years, and that's the way our system is set up."

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Eric Mink is commentary editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Readers may write to him at: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 900 North Tucker Blvd., St. Louis, Mo. 63101, or e-mail him at emink@post-dispatch.com.