A politician’s candor always increases in direct proportion to proximity to retirement. That must be why Dick Armey, the departing house majority leader, so openly discussed his party’s version of pork-barrel politics with the A.P. "There is an old adage. To the victor goes the spoils," he said, explaining why Republican districts have received an average of $600 million more annually than Democratic districts since the Republican takeover. (By the way, that is nearly 18 times the partisan disparity that existed — in the opposite direction — when Democrats last ran the House.) It was good of Professor Armey to share his governing philosophy with us now, even if he and his pals Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay forgot to mention their partisan budgetary objectives when they were promoting the Contract With America in 1994. But their libertarian admirers may be disappointed to learn that these great statesmen were more focused on redistributing wealth upward than in reducing the size of government.

–Joe Conason, Salon.Com August 2002

To the victor belong the spoils.  Those of you who seriously thought that the republicans were fighting for smaller, less intrusive government, more personal freedom from the nanny state, and for fiscal responsibility, are now feel free to feel like they’ve been had.  What they wanted, simply, were the spoils.  Nothing more.  I’m sure historians will debate for generations how the train wreak that was the Bush presidency happened, and why it seemed that they always governed more like a gang of thugs then like the ideologues they presented themselves as being.  But it’s simple.  They’re governing like a gang of thugs, because that’s what they are.

The following story about our imperial vice president may seem trivial compared to Cheney’s unilaterally engineering the withdrawal of the Unites States of America from the Geneva Convention, but it’s everything that is cheap and squalid about the Bush Administration, and by extension the modern republican party, in a nutshell.  

Leaving No Tracks

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House."

Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

With predictable results… 

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.

Other then the wreckage you mean.  Those of you who seriously thought that the republicans were fighting for smaller, less intrusive government, more personal freedom from the nanny state, and for fiscal responsibility, are now feel free to feel like they’ve been had.  Except you were warned.  Over and over again you were warned.  And the warning sign was this: instead of appealing to American’s hopes and dreams, they kept appealing to our fears, to our resentments, to our hatreds…

That should have told you everything.  These thugs, who live in a gutter of fears and resentments and cheap bar stool hatreds, if they know nothing else they know the language of fear, and resentment, and hate.  It’s their point of repose, their magnetic north, their absolute bedrock.  Fear, and resentment, and hate.  And you let them manipulate yours.  And you got what you voted for.  What do tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, liberated now from life itself, hundreds of dead Americans, mostly poor and black, floating in the waters of New Orleans, and the largest fish kill the American west has ever seen have in common? 

Next time, vote your hopes instead of your fears, or it’s your fears you’ll be living with after the election.