Abstract

Cheney's Cronies

Editorial. The article presents an editorial regarding United States Vice President Dick Cheney as of October 2004. As he prepares to debate Halliburton chief executive officer turned Vice President Dick Cheney, Senator John Edwards would do well to study up on his Harry Truman. If Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's running mate wants to have a greater impact in his debate with the Vice President--which follows hard on the first presidential debate--than did the woefully inept Joe Lieberman when he faced Cheney in 2000, Edwards has to drop the faux friendliness of the Washington elites whom Truman so disdained in favor of blunt talk about Cheney, starting with his Halliburton connections. Halliburton has been experiencing a growth spurt ever since Cheney passed through the revolving door of Washington politics to set up the Administration he manages for President George W. Bush. If Edwards brings Halliburton up during his Tuesday night face-off with Cheney in Cleveland, the Vice President will undoubtedly claim--as he has whenever he has been challenged--that he no longer has any connection with Halliburton. The Vice President continues to receive money from Halliburton--$178,437 in 2003 alone--and a Congressional Research Service study has described the sort of deferred-salary payments he receives and the millions in stock options he retains as "among those benefits described by the Office of Government Ethics as 'retained ties' or 'linkages' to one's former employer." As Nation Washington correspondent John Nichols explains in his book, "Dick: The Man Who Is President," most of the pathologies of the Bush Administration can be traced back to Cheney, who chaired the Energy Task Force and pressed Bush to make a second round of tax cuts for the rich, which then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill worried were unwise and unsound.