(Jason Reed/Reuters)
I think we now have much better insights into why the Bush administration always seemed so oblivious to realities that disagreed with their preferred ideology. It wasn't planned, it was just the nature of the men involved.
Mike Allen at Politico interviewed Dick Cheney, who of course has to tolerate interviews now because he's got a book to sell, but any self-reflection on Cheney's part is in short supply:
["]I’m not apologetic with respect to the policies of the Bush administration. I think we basically got it right.”
Eight years in the White House, two wars that are still dragging on — and zero mistakes?
“I didn’t say no mistakes,” he replied. “But … from the standpoint of what I wanted to put down, what I knew about, what I was intimately involved in, I think we got it right.”
It's mostly a fluff article, though more as a result of Cheney's own one-dimensionality than bad reporting. Cheney "kept us safe for 7 1/2 years," according to him. Critics were politically motivated. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" and the "terrorist surveillance program" worked. He doesn't think he was mean to Colin Powell or anyone else in his book.
This part is a bit galling:
And Cheney even claims vindication: “We’ve seen President [Barack] Obama … campaign all across the country, from one end of the country to the other: he’s going to close Guantánamo, ‘Guantánamo is a terrible travesty.’ Well, it’s not, and it’s still open. He ultimately had to adopt many of the same policies that we had been pursuing because that was the most effective way to defend the nation.”
Of course he sees himself as "vindicated." Anything that didn't result in legal charges against him was "vindicated," in his mind.
He may be right in that. Congress granted amnesty to all involved in his wiretapping program, because it wouldn't be fair to hold companies to the law when they were being patriotic and stuff; the Justice Department declined to pursue vigorous investigations into the Bush administration's personal involvement with ordering or justifying torture techniques, because it would be too backwards-looking; the Obama White House declined to pursue whether or not the previous administration had manipulated intelligence in such a way as to fundamentally mislead the public about the reasons for war, because it would be too divisive. All those positions are therefore now enshrined as acceptable policies for future administrations, thus Cheney can reasonably claim those positions "vindicated."
That was the whole rationale for looking backwards, after all, regardless of divisiveness: to demonstrate that lawbreaking was in fact lawbreaking, and could not be tolerated. Absent such a clear statement, the Nixonian view of history remains the prevailing one. It's not a crime if the president (or anyone acting on behalf of the president) does it.