Larry Wilkerson

Chris Matthews made a giant breakthrough tonight: He pronounced Dick Cheney's name right. CHEE-knee. Rhymes with Meany. That's how Cheney's family pronounces his name. I heard his wife say it that way at the 2004 convention. And after Cheney's hunting accident, when the Wyoming legislature had him in as a form of political succor, the speaker welcomed him with the same pronunciation. Chee-knee. Everyone else says CHAY-knee.

There's a larger point. Six years into the most disastrous administration anyone can remember, with a vice president regent, or so it's alleged, and we don't know his name. Cheney likes it that way. "I'm a private person," he told NBC's Kelly O'Donnell yesterday. Go to the New York Public Library website; there are no biographies of Cheney. None. The only thing that comes close is James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans, and it's about a lot of people.

I'd like to know more about Cheney getting thrown out of Yale, Cheney working as a lineman in Wyo, and, most important, Cheney's life in the American Enterprise Institute, what happened there to alter his thinking, just when he drank the neocon koolaid. And how, to again quote Col. Larry Wilkerson's talk at the Middle East Institute—how Cheney became a "paranoid."

Everyone talks about Cheney's power. The "toxic Buddha," Observer editor Peter Kaplan called him. Great image. But that's all we have, imagery and mythology, not knowledge.

In the last few days it's come home to me (a little late!) that we are in a deepening crisis. Have to hand it to you left wing alarmists, you were way ahead of me. My late wake-up call was Seymour Hersh's reporting on the Nuke-Iran option, followed by Larry Wilkerson's comment at the Middle East Institute that Cheney is a straight-up "paranoid." Both men are saying the same thing, and though Hersh is in some ways unreliable (due to an egomaniacal lack of proportion), his political values are unimpeachable. Wilkerson's temperament is much the other way, judicious. But the bottom line: Our leaders lost their minds...

Please, somebody—impeach Bush now. Or when will some Republican, any Republican, show some spine and finally join the Murtha team? (Lindsey Graham where are you!)  read more »

At a speech at the Middle East Institute yesterday, Colin Powell's former chief of staff Col. Larry Wilkerson described Dick Cheney as a dangerous "paranoid," the most powerful vice president in history, a man whose world view was locked in place by 9/11, and the key tossed aside. Wilkerson is an admirable guy. He is speaking out against the Administration because he is ashamed of his own role in promoting a disastrous foreign policy, and trying to do all he can now to avert further damage.

But when Wilkerson was asked why Colin Powell didn't do more to stop this juggernaut when he had a chance, he grinned and said his old boss had asked him not to respond to this sort of question. I will say, Wilkerson went on to say, Powell likes to work inside, behind the scenes, not outside throwing stones. (I'll put the exact quote in when the Institute sends me the transcript)

That's no answer. Powell's collapse in the runup to the Iraq war, so that he might continue to work on the inside, is one of the great tragedies of our time. If he really wants to help out, he should follow the fine military model set by Wilkerson and the many retired generals who have begun attacking Rumsfeld publicly, and say something about the war, now, when a change in policy might actually save lives.

I assume he is planning to wait 30 years ala Robert McNamara to wring his hands when it doesn't matter, and salve his conscience in old age...