Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Cheney’s ‘F’ outburst not about crudity

Commentary by Pat Murphy

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The handwringers, tut-tutters and tsk-tskers have it all wrong about Vice President Richard Cheney’s F-word flare-up that he later cooed with blissful gratification that it had made him feel s-o-o-o-o-o much better.

Sure, the F-word is banned on radio and TV (along with others deemed too salacious and crude for the public’s ears). And, yes, U.S. Senate decorum dictates vastly more gentlemanly discourse than the gutter aside Cheney accorded Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy while posing for a group Senate portrait.

And, yep, Cheney’s go "F - - - yourself!" probably created a wave of gasps in the Cheney-Bush political base of evangelicals, especially the Parents Television Council, which obstinately demands even tougher Federal Communications Commission rules on language.

Lost in the fuss is the actual meaning of Cheney’s coarse epithet.

"F - - - yourself!" is not just an impetuous crudity but quite simply the basic Cheney-Bush White House battle cry—as in, "Take a hike, jerk!"

When questions are raised about the our-way-or-no-way style, the Cheney-Bush White House instructs impudent critics at home and abroad to do you-know-what to themselves.

Take your pick. Flimsy reasons for invading Iraq? Abandoning strict air and water pollution enforcement? Retreating from the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners? Abusing civil rights and privacy of Americans? Driving the country into deeper debt? Handing out tens of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to Cheney’s former company Halliburton and political cronies?

The Cheney-Bush retort: Bug off, buster.

Of course, makeshift diploma mill law or strained after-the-fact opinions from White House lawyers anxious to please the boss are ginned up to excuse what may be illegal.

The jackboot Cheney-Bush "enemy combatant" policy of lock-’em-up-and-forget-’em suffered a rude rebuke from the high court on Monday, for example.

Sometimes laws run against the public good. A wise old lawyer once told me, "It may be legal, but is it right?"

A case in point: Vice President Cheney was determined to conceal the names of cronies attending his energy strategy meetings early in the Cheney-Bush reign, contending he needed the confidentiality of "advice."

The Supreme Court upheld Cheney last week.

Legal secrecy, yes. But was it right? as my old lawyer friend would ask.

Now that the White House has made life easier for energy corporations with loosened environmental laws and the prospect of more public lands thrown open for oil and gas drilling, Cheney’s motive for keeping names of people in those meetings secret is so much clearer.

By connecting names of participants and their companies with benefits of the relaxed energy and environmental rules, even simple-minded taxpayers could see what was behind the secrecy: Cheney’s closed-door meetings weren’t for advice from energy executives to the all-knowing vice president, but rather to make secret deals with energy executives.

It was clear even back then that instead of creating trust and a partnership with the public, Vice President Cheney was telling Americans, to go "F - - - yourself!"

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