I have been wondering for several days, ever since the appalling announcement that President Bush had not decided to end his vacation early until after New Orleans had already been devastated, where exactly the Vice President has been. Now, Cheney is well known as an unusually secretive VP, known for avoiding the spotlight (sidenote: vampires are well known for avoiding sunlight), but this absence is going far even for him.
Even after 9/11, when Cheney was famously spirited away to an undisclosed location, presumably the underground bunker from which the shadow government* would operate in the event of the death of the President and other top officials, he still issued statements to the media to prove that he was still alive. Now, in the time immediately after 9/11/2001, when a plane had crashed into the Pentagon and another was possibly aiming for either the White House or Capital Hill, this was not an unreasonable precaution. Clearly there were people out there who wanted government officials (and other people) dead, and there was a serious expectation of followup attacks, in some form or another.
*(Keep in mind that I don’t mean ‘shadow’ in a conspiracy theory sense, just ‘backup’ as in the ‘shadow cabinet’ in some parliamentary systems.)
Why is Cheney hidden away this time? Is he scared that the terrorists will aim another hurricane at him? Is he on vacation? Is the application of artificial skin over his glowing radiated body flaking off at faster and faster rates, prohibiting him from appearing publicly?
Andrew Sullivan’s latest article in The Times points out that “The vice-president was nowhere to be seen.” confirming that I am at least not the only person on Earth to have noticed this fact.
An article from the New York Times gives what seems to be the only tantalizing speck of information regarding Cheney’s whereabouts at any time since August 18.
In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.
My last sentence may be surprising, but in fact, according to my search on Google News, there hasn’t been a single public appearance or statement by Vice President Dick Cheney since the 18th of August, when he appeared at a meeting of the “73rd National Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart in Springfield, Mo.”
There are a number of articles about that event, but they all give pretty much the same dry account of Cheney’s statements to the veteran’s group. Here is one typical example, written by a member of the American Forces Press Service.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 19, 2005 – The U.S. military will not relent in its effort to track down terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, Vice President Richard Cheney said Aug. 18.
“This is not a war we can win strictly on the defensive. Our only option against these enemies is to find them, to fight them and to destroy them,” he told the 73rd National Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart in Springfield, Mo.
“These enemies hate us, they hate our country, and they hate the liberties for which we stand,” he said.
“They have contempt for our values. They doubt our strength. And they believe that America will lose our nerve and let down our guard. They are sorely mistaken.”
Seriously, where has Cheney been? What does he actually do? How can he possibly stay invisible at a time like this? Was he being kept alive all this time by New Orleans voodoo mojo that has now been disrupted by the storm? We all know about the long connection between New Orleans and voodoo zombies after all. It’s the only scenario that makes any kind of logical sense to me. After all, the Vice President couldn’t just be on vacation during the worst natural disaster the country has seen in living memory, right?
[Edit]: An op-ed piece by a Washington Post staff writer in the September 6th edition asks:
Anybody seen Dick Cheney?
I thought I saw Cheney standing behind Bush at one of the Louisiana press conferences, but the guy was staring down because of the beating down sun and all I really saw was a shiny bald head.
But where ever he’s been, I know what he’s been doing. Securing a half billion dollar contract for Halliburton to clean up Katrina.
Apparently, Halliburton also hired on a special consultant for this project. Joe Alba, former director of FEMA. He had a big part in its dismantling, and hired Michael Brown to take over. Apparently the reward for utter failure is to profit from your mistakes to the tune of millions of dollars.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aKgH092kTHLE&refer=us
It’s quite possible he was sick or in a hospital at some point. The man is not exactly in robust health.
Reports hint that he was on vacation at his Wyoming ranch, but they’re extremely vague.
If he was actually so sick that he couldn’t do his job for an entire month then I think that he has a responsibility to resign. And that’s true of any elected official, not just ones that I despise.
I know for a fact that VP Dick Cheney was the guest of an Oregonian lumber baron on a luxurious fishing trip in Alaska, for approximately 3 weeks immediately after 9/11. Cheney was transported to the fishing site on his hosts private jet.