Mutantfrog Travelogue

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?

With the rare exception of economic issues, I don’t normally discuss domestic politics on this blog. However, as a departure from my regular routine, today I offer a few quick thoughts on recent criticisms of the Bush administration in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Comments are based on an article in today’s Washington Post titled, “Critics Say Bush Undercut New Orleans Flood Control.”

Would more money have helped? Probably not. The Post article notes that the President’s Democratic accusers willingly admitted that, “even with full funding in recent years, none of the flood-control projects would have been completed in time to prevent the swamping of the city. This lag between approval of funds and completion of projects seems to suggest that there is more at blame here than just Bush’s refusal to increase spending to the Army Corps of Engineers. As former assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, Michael Parker told the Post, “[e]verybody is to blame – it transcends administrations. It transcends a party.”

And this is probably the most honest and realistic assessment of the situation in the entire article. According to Parker, there is widespread resistance in government to investing in long-term projects such as those required to protect cities like New Orleans from flood damage. And why shouldn’t there be resistance? Long-term projects are often costly and benefits are not immediately seen or reaped. Furthermore, in the case of flood control projects, they may never be reaped. It isn’t difficult to imagine that for the holders of government purse strings there are always more immediate and potentially rewarding causes. The long-term gain is simply not always worth the short-term cost, be it political or monetary.

Are criticisms of the President’s refusal to allocate more money deserved? Perhaps. The details of the budget debate are not clear to me at this time and they were not elaborated upon in the article. It would therefore be premature to make assumptions about Bush’s reasoning for cutting spending on the Corps of Engineers. If a closer investigation of the matter revealed, for example, that the initial proposal to be a public works boondoggle, would anyone have blamed the President at the time for cutting funding? On the other hand, if accusations by the Democrats that Bush’s motivation was a reshuffling of resources to pay for tax cuts and the war in Iraq are true – in other words Bush consciously prioritized tax cuts and the war over domestic spending intended to protect American citizens – then some degree of responsibility certainly lays with the President. It does not mean that he deliberately ignored the safety or well being of these citizens, but in the end he simply made an unfortunate decision. The bitterly ironic fact that in July the White House attempted to block $1 billion to be used for the restoration of coastal wetlands but just yesterday asked Congress for $10.5 billion as the first installment of aid seems to support this point.

Should Bush accept responsibility for this decision? This is irrelevant. Hoping for contriteness from this President might soothe some raw nerves around the country, but it is unlikely to happen, unrealistic to expect, and in the short-term not much will change as a result. The President will adopt a serious, but positive sounding, forward-looking stance, not acknowledging any missteps of his own, as he has done since taking office following every major catastrophe, natural or otherwise. Bush supporters will unquestionably stand behind the President as they have in the face of past criticisms over tax cuts or the war. Those who do not support Bush will continue to be out for his blood. And perhaps a small number of Americans might experience disenchantment great enough to shift their political allegiance. In the long-term, if combined with growing dissatisfaction over the war in Iraq, rising oil prices, or some other unforeseen disaster, might reflect negatively on the President, but for now the issue is rather moot.

Partisan politics aside, we are all faced with choices and no one gets everything right. We cannot expect Bush to get it all right either. Certainly the decisions he makes as President may have greater consequences than those made by you or me on a daily basis, but another point of similarity is that in the end we must all bear the consequences of our decisions and Bush is no exception. It is hard to say at this point exactly what those consequences might be.