Charming Maureen Dowd: If Cheney's Bad Heart Had Disqualified Him for VP, Many Americans Wouldn't Have Lost Lives and Limbs

October 30th, 2013 9:32 PM

In Wednesday’s New York Times, former reporter and columnist Maureen Dowd lamented how the “incalculably destructive Dick Cheney” is once again “ominously omnipresent” in media interviews. She loathed how “he still can’t emulate the respectful restraint of his former partner, George W. Bush. He grabs every opportunity to snarl at President Obama, who is still mopping up from the Bush-Cheney misrule.”

How many times has Dowd complained that Bill Clinton couldn’t emulate the “respectful restraint” of either Bush? Lacking either restraint or respect, Dowd borrowed a page from Bill Maher and insisted that if Cheney had been medically disqualified from being Vice President, many dead soldiers would still be alive and many soldiers without arms or legs would still be whole: 

If the doctors had not signed off on Cheney’s heart as “normal,” then Cheney would never have been vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld never would have been defense secretary, and Paul Wolfowitz never would have been his deputy, etc., etc. And W. wouldn’t have been pushed and diverted into Iraq.

In this alternative scenario, “It’s Not a Wonderful Life,” where Cheney is not peddling his paranoia, how many Americans would not have lost their lives and limbs?

It's always a zero-sum game for liberals. There's never an alternative scenario where a MoveOn.org-pleasing president fails to go to war with anyone, and more terrorist attacks on the American homeland follow. Dowd could never bear to ponder the notion that post-9/11 weakness would result in anything but a placid world without "24" on Fox.

These people really can't stand Obama being criticized. Cheney had “chutzpah” to blame Obama for anything: “Dick Cheney’s chutzpah extends to charging the Obama administration with ‘incompetence’ in the Middle East and saying that the president has done ‘enormous damage’ to America’s standing around the world.”

So did Bill Clinton have "chutzpah" when he suggested Bush and Cheney were messing up his masterful foreign policy -- when 9/11 happened soon after he left office? But here's what you'll find with a search of Dowd, Clinton, and the word chutzpah. 


You find Dowd's June 29, 2003 review of Hillary's memoir Living History, where chutzpah is terrific: "Her remarkable mother, deserted as a child, instilled in her the chutzpah that would allow her to triumph over feral assaults from the right, including a trifecta of attack books by blond conservative pundettes."

On June 27, 2004, you find Dowd using the word negatively, again at Cheney:  "Mr. Cheney's foul outburst was not as bad as his foul reasoning. On Fox, he again belabored his obsession with 'links' between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Exhibiting WASP chutzpah, this time he used The Times to bolster his faux case."

PS: It is only fair to report Dowd did use the C-word on May 23, 1996 when it came to the Paula Jones sexual-harassment suit (which Clinton later settled for $850,000): "In a move that marks a new level of chutzpah in American politics, Mr. Clinton's lawyers mentioned in their appeal to the Supreme Court on Paula Corbin Jones's sexual harassment suit that the President may be protected by the Soldiers' and Sailors' Civil Relief Act of 1940, which was designed to give American troops some protection from civil suits while on active duty."