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Looking good being wrong

Cheney gives off authoritative patina, unlike the president; too bad the facts don't bear him out

Marie Cocco

October 7, 2004

Give that man a bonus.

The chief operating officer did exactly what he was hired to do in the vice presidential debate. Dick Cheney emerged as the president's right-hand president.

Cheney was authoritative where President George W. Bush, in his own debate against John Kerry, was awkward. He was capable of marshaling arguments that had somehow escaped the president's recall. The vice president was calm where Bush was cranky. Cheney was steady and paternal, where Bush was stubborn and adolescent.

Cheney is a better Bush than Bush.

Now we see how it has come to pass that so much power seeped from the Oval Office to the vice president's suite. There is nothing you can successfully argue Cheney out of - his authoritative demeanor is a shield too thick to penetrate. Even with the toughest, most persistent facts.

Take the fact that there is no connection between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq. This simply does not pierce Cheney's ideological or intellectual armor.

He opened the debate with a masterfully deceptive discourse in which he again linked the two. Cheney wound through all sorts of verbal cul-desacs like saying that after 9/11, "we had to go after the terrorists wherever we might find them." He finished up where he really wanted to be, on this point: The vice president asserted that Saddam Hussein had an "established relationship with al-Qaida," and former CIA director George Tenet had said so.

Can it be? No it can't.

The CIA has found what virtually everyone else who looked into this assertion has concluded: That though there were occasional contacts over many years between the Iraqi regime and terrorists linked to al-Qaida, these never jelled into a cooperative relationship. The independent 9/11 Commission concurs.

Having come right out and made the link once again, Cheney then performed a remarkable pivot for a man of his size. When John Edwards called foul on the deception, Cheney claimed injury: "The senator has got his facts wrong," he sneered. "I have not suggested that there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."

Well, yes he did - not only in the debate but in a remarkable run of television interviews and campaign speeches where he recycled theories that have long been debunked. We are, though, supposed to accept Cheney's assuredness as a sign of his veracity.

So it will indeed be a hoot to see what happens when the late-night comics get a crack at Cheney's attack on Edwards' skimpy senate record. "In my capacity as vice president, I am the president of the Senate and the presiding officer," Cheney said. "I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."

The blow landed squarely, and with force. Edwards sat in stunned silence. Now, though, pictures have surfaced of the pair together at a prayer breakfast, where Cheney sat next to Edwards. They also participated together in the swearing-in ceremony of North Carolina's Republican senator, Elizabeth Dole.

This is the sort of folderol that got Al Gore in trouble four years ago - all that gobbledygook about him mixing up when, and with whom, he'd visited disaster victims. Somehow the 2000 Bush campaign turned the mistake into a character flaw, incontrovertible evidence that Gore was unfit.

Now Cheney has topped this with his bare lie about never having met Edwards. Will it have the same impact?

In a way, I wish it wouldn't. The nation is at war abroad and struggles at home with fear of another terrorist attack. Millions are strained by an economy that is moving forward too slowly to lift them up. The gravity of this election has been underscored by the remarkable substantiveness of the first two debates.

Silliness about Tuesday luncheons at the Capitol - they are, by the way, partisan gatherings where no member ventures to the other side's redoubt - should not really figure in. Except as an emblem of the larger and more serious problem.

The people have been deceived about matters that really do count. About the nature of the Iraqi threat before we invaded. About the number of troops needed. About the nature of the insurgency. About whether we can afford another tax cut at home.

The vice president speaks with great authority on these subjects. Unfortunately, the record shows him to be authoritatively wrong.

Marie Cocco is a nationally syndicated columnist and member of Newsday's editorial board. Her e-mail address is [e-mail].

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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