Some hush-hush bang-bang is going on at the vice president's house: big
blasts twice a day, morning
and night, that cause the whole neighborhood to quake and shake.
Rattled neighbors cannot learn what's going on at Mr. Cheney's Disclosed
Location from the Navy,
which maintains the official residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory.
"We're doing infrastructure improvements and utility upgrades," says the Navy's Cate Mueller.
If Dick Cheney won't tell us which energy fat cats drew up our energy policy,
he's not going to tell us
why we're paying to renovate his pad.
The construction, which could last 16 months, is related to "national security
and homeland defense,"
according to a letter from the observatory's superintendent printed in
The Washington Post.
I'd say we have four possibilities:
1. Mr. Cheney is building a giant vault. Now that a judge appointed by
the president says that
anything the vice president does can be kept secret, there is even more
incentive for him to run the
government so everything can be secret and stored away in the vault.
2. He's suffering from a bad case of bunker envy and wants a command center
and bunker like the
president's in the White House and Rummy's in the Pentagon.
3. He's digging a tunnel in case he has his priorities backward and we
should be more concerned with
Al Qaeda than Iraq. A secret tunnel at his house could easily feed into
the secret tunnel at the nearby
Russian Embassy leading up to a safe house; the tunnel was built in the
late 1970's by the F.B.I. and
National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Russian diplomats, and abandoned
after the Russians
found out about it from the F.B.I. counterspy Robert Hanssen.
4. He's constructing an underground disco. If he appears in a Travolta
white suit and gold chains, his
desire to replicate the Gerald Ford era would be realized.
It's a mystery why President Bush doesn't want to stock his cabinet with
his contemporaries from
Yale, Harvard and Texas, rather than retreads from the wilted salad days
when Cheney and Rummy
were ruling the Ford White House.
On Monday Bush again heeded Cheney and chose a Ford official to be Treasury
secretary (replacing
the Ford official who was just fired from the job) to work with the Ford
official who is Fed chairman.
Yesterday he chose an old Ford hand as head of the S.E.C. And we have the
recrudescence of the
secretary of state under Ford and Nixon, Henry Kissinger.
Ford was the Fillmore of our time. His administration was famous for its
hapless economic policy,
fighting inflation with marketing, passing out those silly little buttons
that read WIN (Whip Inflation
Now). What do we remember of that era except the pardoning of Nixon, the
fall of Saigon and
the falls of Chevy Chase?
The lasting mark of that White House was tamping down the post-Watergate
zeal for truth, containing
Congressional and media investigations into C.I.A. abuses such as assassinations
of foreign leaders
and F.B.I. overreaching on infiltrating civil rights groups.
It was in that battle that the Ford alumni — Rummy, Cheney & Kissy
— forged their worldview that the
greatest threat to the country was the prying eyes of the public, the press
and Congress.
Trent Lott may want to turn the clock back to Jim Crow. Mr. Cheney just
wants to go back to a time
before Vietnam and Watergate, when there was more government secrecy and
less moral relativism.
The administration is chockablock with people who kept the public and Congress
in the dark on
foreign intrigue. Adm. John Poindexter, who took the fall for Iran-contra,
is now in charge of expanding
the universe of secrets to include dossiers at the Pentagon on every living
American, under the
Orwellian heading of Office of Information Awareness.
Elliott Abrams, who misled Congress on Iran-contra and was pardoned by
the first President Bush, is
in charge of the Middle East for the second President Bush. Otto Reich,
who worked with Ollie North
and ran the covert program to get public support for the contras, now runs
Latin American policy.
Maybe instead of worrying about American children who don't do history
lessons, we should worry
about American presidents who don't care about the lessons of history.