Sherry Chandler

Dick Cheney’s Dangerous Son-In-Law

No one present was prepared for what came next: the late arrival of an unexpected visitor, Philip Perry, general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Perry, a tall, balding man who bears a slight resemblance to Ari Fleischer without the glasses, was brusque and to the point. The Bush administration was not going to support granting regulatory authority over chemical security to the EPA. “If you send up this legislation,” he told the gathering, “it will be dead on arrival on the Hill.”

The Forgotten Families

Her daughter was killed by a bomb in Iraq. Eight months later, Susan Jaenke is both grief-stricken and strapped — behind on her mortgage, backed up on her bills and shut out of the $100,000 government death benefit that her daughter thought she had left her.

The problem is that Jaenke is not a wife, not a husband, but instead grandmother to the 9-year-old her daughter left behind. “Grandparents,” she said, “are forgotten in this.”

Cheney’s Call:

Early on the morning of June 20, 2002, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., received a telephone call at home from a highly agitated Dick Cheney. Graham, who was in the middle of shaving, held a razor in one hand as he took the phone in the other.

The vice president got right to the point: A story in his morning newspaper reported that telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency on September 10, 2001, apparently warned that Al Qaeda was about to launch a major attack against the United States, possibly the next day. But the intercepts were not translated until September 12, 2001, the story said, the day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Because someone had leaked the highly classified information from the NSA intercepts, Cheney warned Graham, the Bush administration was considering ending all cooperation with the joint inquiry by the Senate and House Intelligence committees on the government’s failure to predict and prevent the September 11 attacks. Classified records would no longer be turned over to the Hill, the vice president threatened, and administration witnesses would not be available for interviews or testimony.

Reconstructing Ronald Reagan (I think this is comedy):

With this reference to America’s inhibiting religious inheritance, it becomes clear that one of [John Patrick] Diggins’s main purposes is to set forth the somewhat startling theory that Reagan was heavily influenced by the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth-century poet, essayist, and philosopher. At the peak of his intellectual powers in the 1830s and 1840s, Emerson was instrumental in creating the Transcendentalist movement, a philosophical reaction against orthodox Calvinism and the Unitarian Church’s rationalism. The Transcendentalists developed their own faith, which held that God is present—immanent, in theological language—within man and nature. This gave man an important, even rarefied status. “The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God,” Emerson wrote in his essay titled Nature. From this exhilarating belief came an optimism alien to New England’s glum Puritan culture. The individual was no longer a doomed sinner in the hands of an angry God; he was now divine, now himself part or parcel of God. The political consequence of this, which is what interests Diggins, is enhanced importance for the individual. What emerges is a new optimistic individualism.

Optimistic individualism begins to sound vaguely like Ronald Reagan, but it takes some effort to visualize Reagan immersed in Emerson’s writings. Diggins is insistent, however, that they contributed heavily to Reagan’s world view, blessing him with an “Emersonian outlook” which accounted for his habitual optimism, political popularity, and success in ending the cold war.

And finally, not exactly a confidence-building set of precedents (h/t Taegan Goddard):

No United States senator has been elected president since John F. Kennedy in 1960, but former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is challenging an even more formidable historical hurdle: No former mayor has been elected president since Grover Cleveland of Buffalo in 1884 and Calvin Coolidge of Northampton, Mass., in 1924.

Molly Peacock breaks the proscenium arch in this poem by calling attention to the poetic device she uses. It’s a device of humor but also one that makes us realize that more is going on here than just the description of a “lifestyle.’

from Breakfast with Cats

The advent of the new habit occurred
the Tuesday the cats ignored us, when I
fell in love with my new electric frother,
overfrothing the milk. Monday we ignored them.
Deadlines to meet, of course. Never got to make love.
Never eat breakfast at a proper table…
We eat in the living room by the big window
So we can hear every decibel
of the buses’ brakes’ bellows’ breath below
where the East Village spreads out in blocks & streets
like the wheat field squares & apple orchard rows
our cats would roam in—if not for that word “like.”

By the end of the poems, the cats are, of course, transformed into gods.

And every morning since they each have sat
in the original position of the bowls,
waiting for their froth,
for which gods live.

Think about the metaphysics of that. Go and find the whole poem and read it.

Text is from Cornucopia. New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002)