Dick Cheney has long crusaded to restore the executive branch to its pre-Watergate glory. He has overshot the mark so dramatically that it seemed that he might never be called to account (he is, after all, only the Vice-President), especially with henchmen like Scooter Libby ever-ready to take whatever heat that might threaten the endless winter of his steely resolve. But the Vice President now finds himself in need of others to deny his having said and meant what he quite plainly said and meant about waterboarding. (Don't count on hearing him say, "Your Vice-President is not a waterboarder"; his last word on the matter will likely remain: "I didn't say anything, he did.") Keith DeRose offers a parable:
A town in the Old West had had some troubles with cattle rustlers. Some of the townfolk wanted suspected rustlers to be hung or somehow executed – anything to keep them safe from the rustlers. And it was widely known that Sheriff Gus’s men had hung one particularly notorious rustler, Dastardly Dan. But some of the townfolk didn’t like the idea of executing rustlers....
Understandably, those who wanted rustlers to be executed if it could help make the town safer from rustling often avoided straightforward terms for what they thought should be done to rustlers. So, for instance, one way of killing prisoners that had been used was by pushing them off of a very high cliff outside of town, so that they would die on the rocks below. But some who thought it was fine to kill rustlers by pushing them off the cliff liked to talk about it in such euphemistic terms as this: “Well, if we have to make a few rustlers take a little fall to keep the town safe, we should do that.” And, though some would say straightforward things like, “Hang rustlers, if it will help keep us safe,” others preferred to say things like: “If we have to make a few rustlers swing on a rope to keep the town safe, we should do that.”
Which brings us to the interview. A reporter from the town paper was allowed to interview the Deputy Sheriff, and this is how it went:
REPORTER: Deputy Dick, I've heard from a lot of readers -- that's what we do for a living, talk to good folks in the town every day -- and a lot of them have told me, “Please, let the Deputy Sheriff know that if takes making a few rustler swing from a rope, we’re all for it, if it makes the town safer from rustlers.” And this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?
DEPUTY DICK: I do agree. And I think the rustler threat, for example, with respect to our ability to execute really bad rustlers like Dastardly Dan, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the town. We need to be able to continue that.
REPORTER: Would you agree a swing from a rope is a no-brainer if it can save the town from rustling?
DEPUTY DICK: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Deputy Sheriff "for execution." We don't execute. That's not what we're involved in. We live up to our promises to the town council and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust punishment program without execution, and we need to be able to do that.
Well, of course, this only heightened the suspicion that Deputy Dick, at least, endorsed hanging prisoners, and was only saying things like “We don’t execute” because he meant to not be counting hanging as a form of execution. When word got out about what Deputy Dick had said in his interview, some of Sheriff Gus’s men tried to claim that Deputy Dick hadn’t been talking about hanging at all. But that was very hard to accept. For one thing, they wouldn’t come out and say whether it was the Sheriff’s office now accepted that hanging is a form of execution. But mostly, they had to contend with the words that were exchanged between the reporter and Deputy Dick.
Of course, there are ways of making someone swing on a rope that wouldn’t kill them. In fact, many ways wouldn’t even harm them, and could even be rather pleasant. But there had been a lot of discussion around town about the possibility of hanging rustlers, and in these debates many used “make them swing on a rope” as a euphemism for hanging them. And nobody was talking about any other ways of making rustlers swing on a rope. So it was quite clear that the readers who told the reporter to tell the Deputy to make some rustlers swing on a rope if it would help meant to be using “swing on a rope” as a euphemism for hanging them to death. After all, what “debate” could the reporter be referring to, other than the debate over hanging rustlers, since no other ways of making them swing on a rope had been debated? So when Deputy Dick responded positively to this suggestion, it was hard to believe he wasn’t talking about hanging rustlers. And as if to remove any remaining reasonable doubt about the matter, Deputy Dick himself brought up Dastardly Dan in his response. And Deputy Dick surely knew both that Dastardly Dan had been hung, and that also that it was widely known that Dan had been hung. It was in the town’s papers, after all. And he clearly seemed to be approving of what had been done to Dastardly Dan.
So it was hard to understand how it could be that Deputy Dick wasn’t talking about hanging rustlers. And, as I said, this only strengthened the suspicion that Deputy Dick, and perhaps others in the Sheriff’s office, meant to use “execute” in a very strange way that excluded hanging as a form of “execution.”
And given that the very suspicion that had been strengthened by the interview was that the Sheriff’s office meant to use “execute” in a strange way that excluded many ways of putting prisoners to death, Sheriff Gus’s own response to the incident was particularly unhelpful. Asked about Deputy Dick’s comments, Sheriff Gus simply said, "This town doesn't execute. We're not going to execute."
Meanwhile, the question of the hour in Washington, "What Was Cheney Thinking?" acknowledges that when it gets icy even the mighty can slip.
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