Dick Cheney has a final message for everyone appalled by the record of the past eight years, said The New York Times in an editorial. Quit whining—things are great! Seeking to fashion a glittering legacy from the tatters of his White House tenure, our sneering vice president has been giving interviews in which he’s completely rewriting history, portraying the past eight years as a beneficent reign of unerring judgment. In Cheney’s alternate universe, Iraq was not a foolhardy, immensely costly war sold on false premises, but the “right thing to do.” The torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib had nothing at all to do with the illegal interrogation techniques Cheney championed. And the “crippling” budget deficit owes nothing to the administration’s reckless tax cuts for the wealthy. As for the 70 percent or so of Americans who think he and Bush did a lousy job, what do they know?
Complain all you want, said Paul Mirengoff in The Philadelphia Inquirer, but Cheney was a rare vice president who mattered. “By exerting maximum influence early in the war on terrorism, Cheney set its course.” His aggressive campaign to put al Qaida on the defensive, including harsh interrogations of detainees, was critical in keeping the U.S. safe from terrorist attacks for seven years. Cheney not only had the courage of his convictions, said William Kristol in The New York Times, but he was that rare politician with the guts to speak the unvarnished, unpopular truth. As his exit interviews demonstrate, with Cheney you get “no spin. No double talk.”
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