Dick Cheney Sucks - Democratic Underground

Jcrowley

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Fri Apr-06-07 11:31 PM
Original message

Dick Cheney Sucks

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." — Richard B. Cheney

Cheney's list of sins is as long as any Republican's transgressions. As CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co. from 1995 until 2000, Cheney did little about cleaning up asbestos in his buildings, leading to multimillion-dollar legal judgments against Halliburton. He presided over several rounds of job cuts, including about 11,000 workers in 1999, a year that Halliburton showed a $438 million profit. Since those layoffs, Halliburton's profits rose to $501 million in 2000 and $809 million in 2001.

Cheney's Money Has Roots in Evil
by Dave Zweifel

<snip>

"Of course, U.S. firms aren't generally supposed to do business with Saddam Hussein," he continued. "But thanks to legal loopholes large enough to steer an oil tanker through, Halliburton profited big-time from deals with the Iraqi dictatorship. Conducted discreetly through several subsidiaries in Europe, the transactions helped Saddam Hussein retain his grip on power."

He went on to explain that Halliburton was among more than a dozen American firms that supplied Iraq's petroleum industry with spare parts and helped retool its oil rigs after the Gulf War and after U.N. sanctions were eased in 1998.

The Financial Times of London has estimated that between September of 1998 and the winter of 1999-2000, Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, oversaw $23.8 million of business contracts for the sale of oil-industry equipment and services to Iraq through two of its subsidiaries, Dresser Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump.

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0605-02.htm

The Cheney myth
The veep’s reputation is that of ‘the evil genius.’ His record at Halliburton, though, reveals him to be nothing more than a corrupt, incompetent hack.
BY DAN KENNEDY

FROM THE MOMENT Dick Cheney selected himself as George W. Bush’s running mate, he has cultivated an image of hypercompetent malevolence. Especially since 9/11, the vice-president’s calm, serious-as-four-heart-attacks, vaguely menacing demeanor has been his principal asset, reassuring doubters that the callow Bush had as his consigliere someone who knew precisely how to deal with Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and their ilk. A bad man for bad times, you might say. Or as Cheney himself once put it, "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice way to operate, actually."

Look more closely, though, and it becomes clear that Cheney’s reputation is vastly overblown. The truth is that Cheney is a lifelong screw-up, a mediocre functionary with a mediocre mind. As a young man, Cheney flunked out of Yale and got busted twice for drunk driving. As an up-and-coming government bureaucrat, he was responsible for tactical errors that arguably led to the defeat of the first president he served, Gerald Ford. And as the second-most-powerful person on the planet, he overhyped uncertain intelligence and told outright lies in order to drag the United States into the war in Iraq, our worst foreign-policy blunder since Vietnam.

As John Nichols, Washington correspondent for the Nation, writes in his recently published biography of Cheney, Dick: The Man Who Is President (New Press), "Cheney did not rise on the basis of his competence, as the official spin would have it. His career has been characterized by dashed hopes, damaging missteps, and dubious achievements. No, it was not competence; rather, Cheney has climbed the ladder of success because of his willingness, proven again and again, to sacrifice principle and the public good in the service of his own ambition and of those who might advance it."

http://bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/dont_quote_me/multi-page/documents/04210256.asp