Same As the Old Cheney

Lately Josh Marshall’s been kicking around the question of how Dick Cheney, chief of staff to Gerald Ford and defense secretary to George H.W. Bush, turned into the Dick Cheney, sociopath and vice president, that we all know and despise.

This is an interesting question. But I think the preponderance of the evidence suggests that he didn’t really change that much. The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance was a pretty radical document. It came out of an office Dick Cheney supervised, and was most directly done by Paul Wolfowitz working with some other neocon subordinates who came back in the W. Bush DOD. But when it leaked, the president disavowed it.

By 2001, Cheney had acquired a more powerful position and he had a new boss who was dumber and less moral than his father. But on top of that, the United States had grown accustomed to a world in which there was little objective constraint on its power, and then 9/11 made the public much more receptive to military aggression than it had previously been. Put that together with the fact that Cheney’s baseline views had long tended toward the militaristic and slightly insane, and it doesn’t seem so mysterious.