Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney, United States Vice President (2001 to 2009).

The Impeachables: Mock Dating Profiles Of World Leaders. 

Great books that I’ve read recently . . .

1. ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies’ by Jared M. Diamond.

2. ‘Safe Hunting! An Introduction to Hunting, Guns, and Gun Safety’ by Dick Pryce.

3. ‘Secrets of Offshore Tax Havens,’ by Robert Chappell. I read this while I was CEO of Halliburton. Did you know that while I was CEO, the number of Halliburton subsidiaries in offshore tax havens increased from 9 to 44?

4. ‘The Prince,’ by Niccolò Machiavelli--because it argues the advantages of cruelty and fraudulence, and it taught me that it’s better to be feared than loved.

5. ‘A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law,’ by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Actually I didn’t read it. But I sure do like the author. So much so that I loaned my Air Force Two to Scalia while he presided over a case titled ‘Sierra Club versus Cheney’, and I spent three days with Scalia hunting ducks on the estate of an oil industry executive.

6. ‘Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order’ by Mark Crispin Miller.

7. and 8. ‘Rise Of The Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet’ by James Mann, and ‘Dick: The Man Who Is President‘ by John Nichols. These two books show, amongst other things, how I flunked out of Yale University twice after failing grades due in part to chronic drinking.

9. ‘The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money’ by Dan Briody.

My most humbling moments.

1. Being a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In our January 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, which read like a blueprint for a long-desired yet unnecessary war with Iraq, we forcefully mapped out "America's global leadership." While some of us at the time believed it was not clear whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), he was clearly a threat to the US, Israel, the Arab States, and "a meaningful part of the world's oil reserves." We put our case as follows: "In the short term this means being ready to lead military action, without regard for diplomacy. In the long term it means disarming Saddam and his regime. We believe that the US has the right under existing Security Council resolutions to take the necessary steps, including war, to secure our vital interests in the Gulf. In no circumstances should America's politics be crippled by the misguided insistence of the Security Council on unanimity."

2. In 1986, after President Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill to impose economic sanctions against South Africa for its official policy of apartheid, I voted against overriding the veto.

3. In 1986, I was one of only twenty-one members of the House of Representatives to oppose the Safe Drinking Water Act.

4. In 1979, voting against making Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

5. In 2006, shooting Harry Whittington in the face, neck, and upper torso with birdshot pellets from a shotgun while hunting quail in Texas. Whittington suffered a heart attack--whoops--and atrial fibrillation due to a pellet that embedded in the outer layers of his heart.

My favorite on-screen sex scene.

I like the interrogation scene in the movie version of George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’--John Hurt (as Winston Smith) and Richard Burton (as O'Brien) were hot.

The celebrity I resemble the most.

When I was younger, people said I looked a little like Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Wells) in ‘Citizen Kane.’

The best or worst lies I've ever told.

LIE 1. That I didn’t use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq. Make no mistake, the keyword here is ‘pretext.’

LIE 2. That I didn’t purge competent intelligence professionals from the Department of Defense (DoD) to ease the way to our wars with Iraq and Afghanistan.

LIE 3. That the Iraq war isn’t about oil. Consider the following. Some opponents have accused me of following policies that indirectly subsidize the oil industry and major campaign contributors. This might be related to how I’ve been the head of the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), commonly known as the Energy Task Force, which our president created in his second week of office. Comprised of people in the energy industry, at one point this group included several Enron executives; whoops, sorry again about the improper political and business ties. One NEPDG report, since made public due to a Supreme Court ruling, urges military actions to remove strategic, political, and economic obstacles to increased US consumption of oil.

If I could be anywhere right now, it’d be . . .

1. I’d be right where I am now, in the VP’s mansion in Washington D.C. Boy I love politics. To me, politics is a game where you never stop pushing, and the presidency is like one of those giant medicine balls--if you get hold of it, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back. Ever.

2. Not Panama. As Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush, I directed Operation Just Cause in Panama, in December 1989, which included an aerial assault on Panama City and 24,000 US troops invading the sovereign country. Our official reason for invading was to nab President / General Manuel Noriega’s drug trafficking, long known to Washington. Another motive (though of course it wasn’t an official reason) was maintaining control of the Panama Canal in the face of populist stirrings. During the invasion, an activist tenement barrio was bombed to rubble, and a compliant government, led by Guillermo Endara, was installed. Various independent inquiries put the deaths between 3,000 and 4,000, most of the corpses still rotting in pits on US bases, off limits to investigators. Thankfully, American news networks didn’t regard the UN ’s overwhelming condemnation of the attack to be worth broadcasting.

3. In Wyoming; not in Texas. The Constitution forbids a state's electors from voting for candidates for president and vice president who are both "an inhabitant of the same state as themselves." When Bush asked me to be his Veep, I too lived in Texas--I had a Texas driver's license and filed my federal income tax using a Texas address. I’d also voted in Texas, not in Wyoming, a state where I hadn’t lived full-time for decades. But when I filled out the forms, I just said I lived in Wyoming.

Five items I can't live without.

1. Halliburton, which did business with Libya’s Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi and the Ayatollahs of Iran.

2. Dresser Industries, a Halliburton subsidiary, which struck lucrative deals with Saddam Hussein.

3. KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown and Root), another subsidiary of Halliburton, which received some of the largest contracts in the rebuilding of Iraq, including one no-bid contract worth $7 billion.

4. US citizens who are designated, at the discretion of the Executive, as "enemy combatants." Please don’t get me wrong though--I don’t want to strip all US citizens of their constitutional and human rights. I only want to order indefinite detention of some US citizens, without access to counsel, without charge, and without opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention.

5. In 2005, I would have put Irving Lewis Libby on this list, but of course now I can and do live without my former Chief of Staff. Besides, Scooter got busted for leaking the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media. He’s since been changed with perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to the FBI and the grand jury; and I got no time for those who can’t undertake personal retaliations on my behalf (I was going after Valerie Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for denouncing the yellowcake basis and other justifications for our invasion of Iraq). More importantly, I got no time for people on my team who can’t successfully evade the authorities.

Fill in the blank: _____ is sexy; _____ is sexier.

Being convicted of one Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) offense is sexy; being convicted of two is sexier!

In my bedroom you’ll find . . .

A map of the world. A well-thumbed copy of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ (Iago is one of my favorite diplomats). A Francisco Goya print of ‘Saturn Devouring One of His Children.’ Also in my bedroom is my handwritten diary--in it you’ll read how I served as Chairman and CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. During my tenure I lobbied to lift US sanctions against Iran and Libya, saying the sanctions hurt business and failed to stop terrorism. Yes, I gathered my energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Yes, I offered the usual excuses about needing to get candid advice on important matters--and the courts bought it! But in my diary, you’ll see that I not only admit to all of this, I also get down to brass tacks. I write about the rebuilding of Iraq, and how Halliburton was granted a $7 billion no-bid contract; I promise there was no conflict of interest; fingers crossed. Oh and by the way, my net worth, estimated to be between $30 million and $100 million, was largely derived from my post at Halliburton, but it’s completely unrelated to the intimate connections I forged with government officials during the decades I spent in public office. And it goes without saying, but I’ll say it in this personal profile, that I truly believe there’s nothing wrong with allowing my old pals to write national policy for an industry in which I’d recently amassed a fortune.

Why you should get to know me.

There are so many reasons why you should get to know me. Let me list a few. I have an insanely grandiose vision of a utopia in the Middle East. I have a vision of a flag for the Middle East too: it’s a variation of the US flag, with a star in every corner and a few stripes in the middle representing peace, love, and democracy--all brought on through preemptive war and military occupation. Surely that must turn you on; no? But wait, I’m just revving up. I was of military age during the Vietnam War but I received five draft deferments, one of these was because I’m a family man: On October 6, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban on drafting married men who had no children. Nine months and two days later, my first daughter was born. Oh, and please don’t worry about my crooked smile, it was only caused by the seven heart attacks I’ve had; four in 1978, at age 37, and subsequent ones in 1984, 1988, and 2000.           

More about what I’m looking for.

You have to enjoy being tied up, blindfolded, and knocked around a bit. Torture turns me on--I’m the Bush administration’s leading proponent of our right to use it as part of our War on Terror. I support our "torture memos," which advocate enhanced interrogation techniques and a new, US definition of torture, one that’s “more liberal” than the international definition. Okay, I’m going to go out on an honest limb here, the US definition of torture contravenes the Geneva Conventions. When Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military and CIA prisons (including black sites that are outside of US legal jurisdiction) in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, Egypt, and other countries, I not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at our prisons. But that’s me.

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