Book says Cheney rejected Bush request to head up Katrina relief

For a long time it's been assumed that Vice President Dick Cheney was the tail wagging the dog, the old pro who told the young White House how it was done.

Now it turns out that caricature may not be far off the mark.

A new book on Cheney by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman reports that the vice president turned down a request from President Bush to take charge of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, shortly after that devastating storm made landfall in August 2005.

According to the book, Bush asked and Cheney said no.

Murray Waas of the Huffington Post obtained a copy of the still-secret book. The Post is shamelessly flakking excerpts from the book on page one of its newspaper. But some portions are still embargoed. Here's the Cheney one:

Days after the storm had passed, when he finally returned to Washington from Crawford, Bush assembled his senior staff in the Oval Office. He was going to set up a cabinet-level task force, he said.

"I asked Dick if he'd be interested in spearheading this," Bush announced. "Let's just say I didn't get the most positive response." Bush nodded ironically toward the vice president, putting on a show for the others: Card, Rove, Bartlett, Condi Rice. His expression, the tone of voice, had a hint of edge. Can you believe this guy?

Anyone who had face time with Bush said he was smarter than the public believed, and meaner. He spared Cheney the thunderbolts -- Rove got the worst of them, when Bush was in a mood to yell -- but now and then aides saw the president give Cheney the back of his hand.

"Will you at least go do a fact-finding trip for us?" Bush asked.

"That'll probably be the extent of it, Mr. President, unless you order otherwise," Cheney replied. He was the Cheshire Cat inverted, only the smile dissolving, the rest of him still in the chair.

If true, that anecdote is one of the most amazing in recent presidential history. Vice presidents are number twos. They do what they are told.

But, according to presidential counselor Dan Bartlett, "Cheney wanted nothing to do with it." Bartlett told the book's author that he liked the idea of sending Cheney to New Orleans, figuring that amid a pathetic federal response to the suffering there, it "would send a powerful signal of our level of concern."

Now he realizes that Cheney might have been right to say no. Cheney "doesn't do touchy-feely," Bartlett told Gellman. "Understanding what people's problems are and showing compassion -- that is an important part of the job. ... He was not going to go down there and hug babies."

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo credit: Evan Vucci / Associated Press

Comments

[michael worle]

Failing, perhaps, to grant Nixon and his gang their proper accolade, this current group has got to be the most hypocritically amoral, dysfunctionaly convoluted Executive Branch in our country's history. The deeper you peel into the rotten onion of these past Bush W. years -- the illegal war, the unashamed assault on the Constitution, the wiretapping, the torture, the criminal neglect, post Katrina (etc., etc., ad nauseum) -- the more the current American government reminds me of Frank Herbert's mephitic Padishah Empire in "Dune". Which begs the question: excepting the 5th Estate, why have none of these felons been held accountable? Or has the separation and balance of powers already been undermined, whilst we guzzle our Dr. Pepper, glued to American Idol, wolfing down the Soma? Our only hope is that when society becomes an addict -- symbolized by the pathetic Cheney's of the world -- it has to hit its Bush-bottom, find a new "sobriety", to transcend that ugly, obsolete paradigm of power and fear. (Man, it feels good to sit here rocking on the porch, free the ego from captivity every full moon, let it howl like it actually knows something!)

[Jagan Ramamoorthy]

Dick Cheney- ummm, He is really a very shrewd and ruthless human being, but a mere human being. The biggest question to ask about everything that Bush and cheney team have done and done it wrongly, is "Why did they refuse to go under Oath? and why would they meet anybody only together and not separately?"

The worst thing that has come out from this Book by Barton on Cheney's character-- is "Dick Cheney wanted every American to be INNOCULATED on the pretext of an imminent Al Queda threat with a Small Pox Virus" to make that Mandatory and when asked "What if there is going to be 300-400 Deaths due to Side effects?" Cheney said " Oh it is far better than having tens of thousands killed at a later time, by Al Queda"
WOW: Al Queda is a creation by CIA and Zbigniew Bzrezenski
But Cheney is not the ONLY culprit here-- the list is pretty long
The guys who are accountable for MANY such things as Cheney has done are:
1) Paul Wolfowitz
2) Maurice Greenberg
3) The entire Carlyle group
4) Haliburton--Cheney's group
5) Hayden, the current Millitary personnel, who heads the CIA.
6) Condoleeza Rice
7) Carl Rove
8) Donald Rumsfeld
9) Raytheon group
10) Warren Buffet's Global Guardian program
11) HAARP
12) Phillip Zelikow-- the mastermind of 9/11
13) Jerome Hauer--Mastermind of creating a diversion, during 9/11 attacks-- Anthrax attack hoax.
14) Robert Mueller
15) David Rockefeller--the brain that controls the American side of NWO, CFR, Illuminati and such Organizations.
16) Rothschilds family in England, that controls the European side of these Secret societies as Conspiracy theorists say.