Cheney's 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.