Time and Perspective

Oh, what a difference a little time can have on a person's perspective. Case in point: Dick Cheney in 1994 and Dick Cheney post-2001. In a CSPAN interview dated April 1994--shortly after the conclusion of Desert Storm--Mr. Cheney defended the first President Bush's choice to not invade Iraq. In the interview, he provided a litany of things that would have gone wrong had the U.S. pursued Saddam Hussein and overthrown his government after pushing his troops out of Kuwait. Recently, a video clip from that CSPAN interview was rebroadcast on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. The clip, archived at MSNBC here, does have Cheney's original comments on Iraq, Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein, but it is over seven minutes long! There is, of course, a commerical (hey, it's a free video folks) before getting into the actual clip. Once the clip does start, it moves from the Countdown intro/montage right into Olbermann musing on how a surgical change in heart might lead to a behavioral/attitudinal change heart -- i.e., replacing the heart with machinery might make a person "heartless" in more ways than one. From that interesting theory, we move into the Cheney bit. After that, we have Olbermann's always entertaining editorializing and an analysis/discussion with guest commentator, John Nichols of The Nation, who discusses what might have caused Cheney's change of heart. If you don't want all of that media fluff, and just want to see/hear Cheney's comments so that you can judge them for yourself, you can find several briefer, more succinct, versions of the CSPAN clip over on YouTube. This one is only 1:23 long and it has not been hit with countless comments. A quick search on YouTube will turn up a number of creative showcases and responses to this historical gem. Watch the Cheney clip and think about what has happened since March of 2003. No matter what your politics, you have to admit that it's pretty chilling.