As the Democratic primaries wind towards their conclusion, it's time to gaze into the political crystal ball to predict what plans Karl Rove’s Ministry of Propaganda has in store. We’ve all heard speculation that the White House is preparing to find Osama bin Laden in October, or that the U.S. will withdraw from Iraq before the elections, but there’s another rumor floating around that just might wind up being true. Vice President Dick Cheney might be dropped from the ticket for “heart” reasons.
This idea has been around for a while, but is picking up new intensity. Cheney does have a poor heart history, and in more ways than one. In addition to his numerous heart attacks, he is at the heart of numerous legal and political controversies. Some Republicans are beginning to think that Cheney should be sent to a new, more secure location—his private home.
In the early months of this administration, Cheney held secret meetings with lobbyists and industry executives from some of the nation’s largest energy companies, including Enron. Reportedly, these lobbyists and executives were given a nearly free hand in crafting the administration’s energy policy and legislation. It is also believed that these meetings led the Bush Administration to take a hands-off policy regarding the California blackouts, which are now believed to have been artificially created by market manipulation to enhance the profits of these same companies.
A U.S. Supreme Court case seeking to force the Vice President to reveal the identities of those participants will be heard this year. That appeal has now become another Cheney scandal. It seems that just after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal, Vice President Cheney flew Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia down to Louisiana in Cheney’s government jet where they enjoyed a friendly duck hunting trip together. Apparently, the good old boy network knows no limits. Despite a public outcry Scalia refuses to recuse himself.
Of course, the Vice President is the former chairman of Halliburton, which has received billions of dollars in government business, much of it in the form of no-bid contracts. Halliburton and its Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) unit have fallen under a dizzying and growing list of allegations of improper activity. KBR was recently forced to admit that its employees accepted a $6.3 million bribe from Kuwaiti subcontractors, resulting in inflated charges to the U.S. army. There is now an investigation into possible overcharges exceeding $60 million for gasoline KBR sold to the U.S. in Iraq. In another investigation, KBR is accused of overcharging the government more than $27 million for meals it never served at five U.S. bases, with investigators looking into KBR meal services at another fifty locations. Recently, the U.S. Justice Department opened an investigation into Halliburton’s role in an alleged $180 million kickback scheme surrounding its joint contract to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria in the 1990s—while Cheney was at the helm. This is in addition to Halliburton’s 2003 admission that KBR had paid bribes totaling $2.4 million to obtain favorable tax treatment in Nigeria.
Although the Vice President continues to receive hundreds of thousand of dollars in deferred compensation from Halliburton and owns 433,333 Halliburton stock options, Cheney claimed last year, “I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years." When pressed with facts obviously to the contrary, he claimed that deferred compensation is not a financial connection, and that he will give any profits from the stock options to charity. In light of the astounding list of bribes, overcharges, no-bid government contracts and all-around finagled dealings of Cheney and Halliburton, one would need an entire salt mine to take his claim at face value.
The war in Iraq has resulted in Halliburton and other Republican-friendly companies cashing in, to paraphrase Cheney, “big time.” And you’ll only need one guess to name the person who made several trips to CIA headquarters to insure that the intelligence reports required to justify a war in Iraq came out just right. Of course, it’s the same person who argued to have President Bush say those now-famous sixteen words in the 2003 State of the Union address, falsely claiming that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material from Niger. It’s the same person who still claimed in January 2004 that Iraq had mobile WMD labs. And it’s the same person who claims that deferred compensation and stock options aren’t financial ties.
If they drop Cheney, it will have to appear to be his choice. Cheney is a darling of the most conservative wing of the Republican Party, who would not take lightly his being forced out. If they felt he had been mistreated, the Republican Party could be split. The only way to avoid that possibility is to have Cheney remove himself. And that is their biggest obstacle.
Cheney is nothing if not avaricious. One need only remember how he came to be nominated in the first place. It’s almost humorous to recall that Cheney was appointed to conduct a national search for Bush’s running mate. After an exhaustive search and weeks of interviewing potential candidates, Cheney found the perfect choice; himself. It doesn’t seem likely that a person capable of such a brazen power-grab would leave quietly now.
In this scandal-ridden administration, Cheney has driven the scandal meter well into the red zone. Dropping him from the ticket might help stem some of the political fallout Republicans face from these scandals. It might help the administration to distance itself from Enron and Halliburton, whose names have become shorthand for corruption. But the American people are unlikely to be satisfied with dropping just Cheney. Voters realize that he is not the only problem. It’s the whole culture of greed and lies and the roster of government looters that Bush brought into his administration. The only way to bring it all to an end is to throw Bush out in November. And that’s just what the political crystal ball is predicting.
Gregory Jefferson, Louisiana