Sunday, March 12, 2006

A Feckless W - The New Rhetorical Reality for the Big Dick Cheney

Good writing is always fun to read (I know, apologies to all regular (and irregular, for that matter)readers of this blog). I love a good paragraph or two when it really hits the "right" nail on the head.

Here, a friend put me on to this New Yorker article that was delightful as it was truthful in its summation of the Big Dick's stature these days. In the correspondence said friend stipulates, upon suggesting I point my cursor over to the article, this:
On Cheney, about whom however little good can be said is still too much.
Here's one paragraph of the delightfully written and insightful commentary to tease you over to the full article's cyber home:
The Vice-Presidency isn’t what it used to be. No one bothered to rate the favorability of Garret Hobart, Charles Dawes, or Alben Barkley. But the clout of that once legendarily insignificant office has been growing for half a century. In his time, Walter Mondale was history’s most powerful Vice-President. So was Al Gore in his. But Cheney is an order of magnitude different. For a number of reasons—his bureaucratic ruthlessness, his domineering influence over a feckless President who seems fated to remain forever inexperienced, his will to power combined with an alleged lack of ambition to succeed his nominal boss—he is universally agreed to be one of the two most powerful officials in the executive branch of the federal government, though it is not universally agreed which one. Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign—not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.

1 comment:

Neil Shakespeare said...

And it's dangerous to the effect that he can hide his nefariousness behind the cloak of the vice-presidency and is, apparently, totally unaccountable.