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Papa Bush: My Son Is To Blame For Letting 'Iron-Ass' Cheney Wreck America

Papa Bush: My Son Is To Blame For Letting 'Iron-Ass' Cheney Wreck America

Over the past decade, the former Vice President, neoconservative robber baron and fugitive war criminal Dick Cheney has become one of the most universally despised figures in American politics for the damage he did to this country in the pursuit of personal profit and his ideological agenda. Cheney’s machinations dragged us into a useless and brutally destructive overseas war which cost us trillions, killed hundreds of thousands, plunged the Middle East into permanent chaos, altering the power balance of the entire world and ruining our international credibility in one fell swoop. He has much to answer for.

Apparently not even the Bush patriarch cares for former Vice President. A new biography penned by Jon Meacham, titled “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush,” contains some surprising revelations from the elder Bush, who took the opportunity to rip his former defense secretary for misleading not only his son but the American people. He admitted that he felt Cheney had influenced Bush’s decisions too much and that his son was mislead by the neocon.

“I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there — some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him.“Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem…You go back to the ‘axis of evil’ and these things and I think that might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything.”

He then went on to criticize his son’s entire administration for the colossal overreaction that followed the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks: “The reaction (to Sept. 11), what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East. He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer.” He didn’t spare his son’s Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, slamming him for his “lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that. Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow.”

But he squarely placed the blame for Cheney’s overreach on his son, former President George W. Bush. “The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department. I think they overdid that…It’s not Cheney’s fault. It’s the president’s fault. The buck stops there.” George W. was unfit for the presidency and was dominated by his Vice President, who brought in an army of loyal staffers and began playing empire with the American military. We still pay the price for his follies to this day.

In the end, it’s a powerful last gasp of truth coming from a man whose family has built an empire of corruption based off lies, distortions, and deceit.

 

Colin Taylor
Opinion columnist and former editor-in-chief of Occupy Democrats. He graduated from Bennington College with a Bachelor's degree in history and political science. He now focuses on advancing the cause of social justice and equality in America.

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