Dick Cheney: “Dr. Strangelove” meets “The Sting”

Above are Dick Cheney and Dr. Strangelove (Cheney is pictured in the wheelchair)

Watching them roll out Dick Cheney in a wheelchair during President Obama’s inauguration reminded me of the character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film of the same name. A few commentators noted the similarity at the time – most notably Tom Brokaw who concluded the comparison was “unfortunate.”

It would be easy to dismiss the visual similarity as only that – something Cheney’s enemies would laugh about for a day or two and then quickly forget. But a closer look at the character of Dr. Strangelove and the behavior of Dick Cheney suggests a deeper and more insidious connection between this fictional character and our former Vice President.

For those unfamiliar with the character, Dr. Strangelove is a wheelchair-bound mad scientist and former Nazi who has become head of weapons research for the United States. Strangelove’s confinement to a wheelchair for most of the film reminds us, in a symbolic way, that his Nazi regime and its twisted ideology had also been crippled and confined.

But fans of Kubrick’s dark comedy know that Dr. Strangelove doesn’t stay confined to his wheelchair forever. At the end of the film, as the world is being destroyed by a nuclear doomsday machine, Dr. Strangelove comes up with a plan to regain power. He and the other political and military leaders go underground so that they can -- with the assistance of ten women for every man -- repopulate the species and emerge after one hundred years of nuclear winter as the leaders of a new world order.

A reenergized Dr. Strangelove gets out of his wheelchair – his Nazi ideology no longer confined – and delivers the final line of the film: “Mein Fuhrer – I can walk!”

It was tempting to believe that Mr. Cheney, his regime, and his twisted ideology were also going to go away for a while. Cheney would confine himself to fly fishing in Wyoming while President Obama could get to work repairing the damage Mr. Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration did to the country.

In the film, Dr. Strangelove was wheelchair-bound for years. Dick Cheney was up and about in a few days – hitting the airwaves and giving a series of interviews that are part of his plan to regain power. His plan is insidious, and, like Dr. Strangelove’s plan, depends upon the destruction of America to succeed.

Mr. Cheney has asserted that any tampering with his illegal, immoral, and un-American policies of torture, false imprisonment, and denial of due process (just to name a few) will result in another terrorist attack on American soil.

President Obama, I was happy to see, vigorously defended his reversal of some of these policies during his recent 60 Minutes interview arguing, among other things, that the use of torture has made us less safe by rallying anti-American sentiment. A good policy argument – but it misses the point.

Here’s where Dick Cheney (AKA Dr. Strangelove) meets The Sting, another of my favorite classic movies.

For those unfamiliar with the film, The Sting starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford whose characters pull off an elaborate con (the sting) against a mob boss (Robert Shaw). Substitute Dr. Strangelove (AKA Dick Cheney) for Paul Newman and substitute President Obama for Robert Shaw (but make his character the good guy) and you’ll see what I’m getting at.

The reason behind Dick Cheney’s numerous television interviews has nothing to do with a policy argument. This isn’t an intellectual debate -- it’s a setup. And the mark is Obama.

Cheney is saying that the next attack on America will happen because of Obama’s tempering with his and Mr. Bush’s destruction of America. Unless we are an America that tortures, that falsely imprisons, that denies due process, and that forgets about privacy rights – an America, in other words, that becomes everything our Constitution says is un-American -- we will be attacked.

And the brutally honest truth is that Dick Cheney, if allowed, will eventually win this argument.

He will win, not because he is right, but because when we are attacked again we will be scared again – and we will again be willing (and even eager) as a nation to give up our rights and our principles in the name of a very false sense of security.

In politics, it is often wrong but simple arguments that prevail.

So we will wrongly blame President Obama and his “liberal” policies. We will call him “soft” and “a bleeding heart” and long for the days when we had people in the White House that could make the “hard choices” necessary to keep America “safe.”

There is no argument, no matter how rational or factually accurate -- and no speech – no matter how moving and eloquent -- that will be able to save Mr. Obama. Dick Cheney’s regime will return to power and America will continue in name only.

I say that Mr. Cheney will eventually win because of another uncomfortable but brutally honest bit of truth that Dick Cheney is counting on for his plan to succeed. We will almost certainly be attacked again during Obama’s presidency.

This attack will happen. It will happen whether President Obama keeps the Bush/Cheney policies or whether he scraps them. It will happen if Obama were to quit and __________ (insert any name you like here) becomes President. It is practically inevitable – and I suspect all the major players know it.

Perhaps this is what Vice President Biden was referring to during the campaign when he said Obama would be tested by a crisis but that we should stick by him because he would be right.

Perhaps Mr. Biden was referring to the fact that Al-Qaeda has already proven itself capable of a major strike on American soil every eight years or so – which makes another attack due about now. Perhaps he was referring to the fact that no government policy – not even martial law and a wall around this great country of ours – can protect us against a determined group of fanatics willing to kill themselves for their cause. This country is just too big – and there are just too many soft targets to defend them all.

Yes -- Dick Cheney is, with every interview he gives, planting the seeds of his return. But President Obama doesn’t have to let Cheney win.

The easy path to defeating Cheney’s plan would have been to look the other way -- continue the Bush/Cheney policies and hope nobody would notice. Thankfully, President Obama has demonstrated great integrity and courage by overturning some of these policies and by condemning in the strongest terms the use of torture by the United States.

Give the President some much deserved credit here – this was the most politically dangerous decision he has made thus far.

And to defeat Mr. Cheney and to give pause to any future leader who would ignore the Constitution and international law, President Obama is going to have to make an even more difficult decision.

President Obama is going to have to ask for a special prosecutor with the intent of not only investigating – but of also punishing those in the Bush administration – Dick Cheney included – who participated in war crimes such as authorizing torture.

It is important to understand that this isn’t a radical idea. Indeed, the government of Spain recently initiated criminal investigations against six former Bush administration officials for conspiring to authorize torture at Guantánamo Bay.

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems reluctant to act on this issue. Indeed, some have wondered whether the Obama administration is actively protecting members of the Bush administration for political reasons.

It is very disappointing that the United States under President Obama is shirking both its legal and moral responsibility to investigate these war crimes.

I’m not quite sure what Mr. Obama’s political calculation is here – but to take the position that this issue can be ignored by his administration for very much longer is catastrophically wrong.

Yes, President Obama has a lot on his plate right now and doesn’t want to get sidetracked with yet another major issue. And yes, an investigation of the Bush administration would anger Republicans. But… so what?!

Politically speaking, Republican anger is almost inconsequential at this point. Democrats control the House and if Republicans want to filibuster in the Senate – let them. They can’t keep that tactic up forever and it will backfire politically. And if Obama still has hopes of getting bipartisanship with Republicans, forget it. Republicans have demonstrated pretty convincingly that they don’t do that.

It is only by clearly showing these policies were criminal and by severely punishing all involved that we can have any hope that the Dr. Strangeloves of this country will be confined to their wheelchairs for some time to come.

Indeed, if the use of torture by the United States is allowed to become a matter of serious political debate, then Dick Cheney has already won.