Cheney's Gravy Train

By Hugh Jackson, Las Vegas CityLife
Posted on July 31, 2000, Printed on May 27, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/9519/cheney%27s_gravy_train

Oil field Ubermensch Dick Cheney, George W.'s choice for VP, had to switch his residency from Texas back to his "native" Wyoming, because there's a constitutional thing about the president and the vice president being from the same state. Too bad there's not a prohibition against running mates being from the same industry.

Anyway, Dick's a good little soldier. Well, he's not really a soldier. Spent the '60s in college, actually, working toward a Pretty Heavy Degree in Political Science.

But he's a consummate politician. In fact, he's a career politician. He never earned that Ph.D., abandoning scholarship to work in the federal bureaucracy. He hooked up with the Ford administration, and the next thing anybody knew young Dick was the White House chief of staff. After Carter beat Ford, Cheney returned to Wyoming, where he hadn't lived for a while. Wyoming, like most Western states, is characterized chiefly by a severe inferiority complex. So the state's voters were more than happy to graciously award a Washington Somebody like Cheney a decade in the House.

Cheney should give thanks every day to two men. The first is Spiro Agnew. If Spiro hadn't been a thieving Republican crook, Ford never would have been VP and, later, president, and Cheney today might be no more than a high-ranking but mostly anonymous administrator somewhere in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy.

The second man Cheney should thank every day is a former U.S. senator from Texas named John Tower. When George Bush -- the tongue-tied one who used to be president, not the tongue-tied one who's running for president -- ascended to the throne after Reagan, Bush named Tower as his secretary of defense. It turned out Tower liked to get hammered and dance on top of pianos with naked women, or somesuch tomfoolery. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But Bush had to do a rethink, and went looking for the safest, least colorful, most typically white bread politician he could find. Dick Cheney was the obvious choice.

Along came Saddam Hussein, threatening something that was very, very dear to the Bush administration and all it stood for. No, not national security. And no, not the independence of a sovereign nation. Saddam was threatening the long-term profits of multinational oil corporations. This, as Bush the Elder informed us at the time, could not stand. Dick Cheney, failed Ph.D. candidate, became Dick Cheney, war hero.

Seeking re-election, Bush the Elder went to a grocery store, where he was bedazzled by price-scanning technology. That pretty much confirmed what everybody suspected about Bush being an out-of-touch aristocrat. Bush lost to Clinton, and Dick, for the very first time in all his adult life, sought actual, real employment in the private sector.

Dick landed pretty well. He was named CEO of Halliburton Co., a worldwide oil field service giant.

As a certified initiate in the most elite of petroscum circles, Dick might be viewed as a risky choice for Bush. Oil prices are still sky high, and the average asshole on the street doesn't like the oil industry any more than he likes the government. And Bush, you may remember, is the "compassionate conservative." Well, Halliburton -- and Cheney -- may be a lot of things: greedy industrialists out to scuttle the Kyoto environmental agreements and gut the Environmental Protection Agency; gluttonous feeders at the corporate welfare trough; purchasers of elected and non-elected officials in the U.S. and abroad. (That the mainstream media is calling Cheney a "safe" choice shows just how irrelevant the election is.) But compassionate they're not.

In fact, Cheney is one cold sonofabitch.

And that coldness, or coolness under fire, as the Bush camp will no doubt prefer to call it, gets right to the heart of the biggest risk Cheney poses for Bush. That, of course, is the fact that Dick is so very, very slick. He always has an answer to every question. He never falters, never looks rattled. The Bush campaign might want to keep Dick under wraps, because the more he's on TV, the dumber, the less ready for prime time, George W. will seem by comparison.

But let's put Dick's slickness and flashy resume aside for a moment. Perhaps the best way to understand Dick is to understand a little about his "native" Wyoming.

Wyoming has the slowest, least-diversified economy in the nation, ranking at or near the bottom in a host of economic indicators, including median household income. In town after town, buildings are empty and boarded up. Anybody who is employable leaves, the result being that the young people who stay are those most likely to steal from their neighbors, get drunk and beat their wives and kids or, if they're ambitious, run a meth lab. The state's been going down this track for years, ever since the energy boom of the 1970s went bust.

Every two years throughout the '80s, Dick would show up to tell everybody how he was working hard in Congress to represent Wyoming, how he was the right man to help the people of his native state. But if ever there was an opportunity for an individual to help a state, it was in 1994, when former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney might have returned to Wyoming, run for governor, and used his formidable national and international clout to help attract industry and move his poor state forward. Of course, he bolted.

Sure, Dick can claim Wyoming residency now -- but not in Casper, his hometown, where the oil refineries that once fueled the economy are now rusting hulks oozing petrochemical waste into the North Platte River. No, Dick has a summer palace over in foo-foo Teton County, a resort enclave where the billionaires have kicked out the mere millionaires, and where the servant class has to be trucked in every day and trucked out at night.

Dick's career is all about Dick. He never gave a shit about the people in his own state. It's hard to see why he'd give a shit about people in the rest of the country, unless they're huge campaign contributors and denizens of Dick's now-native territory, corporate boardrooms. Which, when you think about it, makes him a perfect companion to that smirking little aristocrat at the top of the GOP ticket.

Bonus observation: If you think Tipper Gore is an annoying vice president's wife, wait until you get a load of Lynne Cheney.

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