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The Cosmic Scorecard

Added: September 11, 2007

Now that Dick Cheney's political career is winding down, I'm thinking its time for a nice little past-tense scorecard on his 40 years in government.

On the surface, it appears that his influence was considerable. He became Ford's chief of staff at age 34 (34...wow that's young!), served in Congress from 81-89, was Secretary of Defense from 88-92, spent 5 years making an gargantuan fortune as CEO of Halliburton from '95-2000, and then served two terms as one of the most powerful Vice Presidents in recent history. That's a pretty impressive career, certainly more impressive than mine - that's for sure.

If we delve a bit deeper to look for some hard numbers, however, things get tricky fast.

Influence vs. Intent - The TIME Person of the Century
Evaluating the impact of a single person on the world in which they live is a tricky business. When I worked for TIME Magazine in the late '90's, we went around and around on the distinction between influence and intent when debating who should be "Person of the Century". The main point of contention was Adolf Hitler - without a doubt one of the most influential people of the 20th Century - and how to evaluate his impact. One side argued that Hitler's influence, good or bad, was all we should take into account in tallying his score. The other side held fast to the idea that TIME should not celebrate in any way the doings of an evil man, regardless of how "influential" he was. The debate went on for nearly 18 months, and gave rise to an incredible variety of arguments and counter arguments within the walls of 1271 6th Avenue. In the end, TIME wisely chose Albert Einstein as the Person of the Century, sidestepping the influence vs. intent debate and choosing an uncontested genius to take the prize.

From this I came away with 3 basic guidelines for evaluating the impact of a person on the world in which they live:

1. Intent and influence coinciding.
-Martin Luther King overtly set out to fight for the civil rights of African Americans. He did lots of things in his lifetime to further this cause, and saw significant success before he died. Even after his death, the organization and inspiration he provided continued to help the cause, and his ideas continued having influence. The primary effect of his actions was in line with his intent.

2. Intent and influence NOT coinciding
-Adolf Hitler set out to exterminate the Jews and enslave Europe. His actions led to a temporary sway in favor of his intentions, but then swung around the other way in a massive backlash. The end result was the complete destruction of Germany and his own death.

3. Unforeseeable connection between intent and result
-Adolf Hitler set out to exterminate the Jews and enslave Europe. His actions ultimately resulted in the destruction of Germany, but after that resulted in the rebuilding of Germany into a powerful and prosperous liberal democracy. A prosperous Germany was definitely one of Hitler's goals, and the line of causality from WWII to Germany's post-war prosperity is clear, however, the positive outcome took a path so divergent from anything Hitler could have planned for (and indeed took place after his death) that it cannot be attributed to his will - only to an indirect result of his influence.

In this scoring system, events fitting category #1 add to your score, events in category #2 are subtracted from your score and events in category #3 count for zero.

Of course, there are many other intricate and subtle ways that people influence the world in which they live, but we are going to boil things down to these three so we can move on with the story.

The next thing we have to do is figure out a method of determining what a person really wants in the pursuit of their life. One of the most popular way of determining what someone's intentions are is to go with what they say - ideally under oath. This can get a bit tricky with politicians, however, since they say all kinds of things all the time for all kinds of reasons - oath or not. Luckily, politicians also write and implement policy, which is an excellent way of determining what they actually, really want.

As it turns out, Dick Cheney was deeply involved in two policy documents very early on in his first term as VP, and we can use them to derive some pretty clear goals.

Rebuilding America's Defenses was published in Sept. 2000 while the neo-cons were still sitting on the sidelines of the world geopolitical game. Cheney was one of the founders of the organization that published it (The Project for a New American Century) and it is widely accepted that Rebuilding America's Defenses is an accurate representation of his foreign policy goals and ideas.

The other major document was the report from the (now infamous) National Energy Policy Development Group, published in May of 2001. Cheney chaired the super-secret commission and coordinated production of the report, so we are going to take it as an honest representation of his ideas.

Based on these two documents, we can derive three broad goals that Dick Cheney had when entering office in January 2001, and put together some type of coherent evaluation of his success or failure in accomplishing these goals.

Goal #1: Kill and/or dominate millions of people
Rebuilding America's Defences is a spectacular document to read. I've written about it several times before, and I always seem to find something new and amazing every time I read it. The world is portrayed as a seething pit of scheming, intractable enemies, biding their time out of striking distance, waiting for their chance to take us down, kill us all, and steal our stuff. The antidote proposed for this situation is to undertake a massive increase in military spending, expand our forces to every corner of the globe and militarize space (through the creation of - believe it or not - a new branch of the armed services called the "U.S. Space Forces", presumably comprised of a large number of heavily armed "Space Men").

It is a rare contemporary expression of pure militarism (very resonant with the 19th century ideas of Heinrich von Treitschke), which ignores virtually every hard-earned lesson from the 20th century (i.e. the enormous value of diplomacy, compromise, economic interdependence and shared interest in the execution of statecraft). You don't have to read between the lines very much in this document to see that the call to action is a massive, global military campaign designed to impose will of the United States by force on anyone who gets in the way.

Up until May of 2003, Cheney made some really solid progress with this goal. Phase one of the global domination effort was launched, several hundred thousand people were killed and a nation of 25 million people was enslaved. Shock and Awe had worked as planned in Iraq - North Korea and Iran were next in line. Unfortunately, the spectacularly ill-conceived campaign unraveled after only a month or two and turned into an epic disaster. Far from being a trend-setting demonstration of American super-powerfulness, the Iraq war has been a very high-profile demonstration of the limits of American power, and has emboldened our enemies, alienated our allies and reduced overall American esteem and influence in the world to its lowest point in a century. Due to the scale of disaster that the pursuit of his ideas caused, chances are high that the backlash cycle will continue onward for years (if not decades), and all traces of Cheney-style militarism will likely be eradicated from public policy for the indefinite future.

Final Score for Goal #1
The 600,000 killed and the deposed second-rate dictator definitely scored some early points for Cheney's intent - he's got to get at least 7,400 for that stuff. However, the zero countries conquered and the elimination of his ideas from government policy will cost him about 41,750 points, and the continuing negative backlash will probably cost him another 53,900-103,250 points over the next decade if the current trends continue (I am, admittedly, speculating quite a bit here). Net score so far: 34,350 in the hole and counting.

Goal Number 2: Rape the Environment
The energy policy created by the National Energy Policy Development Group laid out a basic three pronged plan for the destruction of the American landscape as we know it: 1. The elimination of "outdated" environmental laws regulating corporate pollution 2. The "streamlining" of nuclear and coal fired power plant permits 3. The opening up of vast tracts of public land to resource extraction.

Once again, the short term trend was markedly in favor of Cheney's intentions, as a horde of former officials from the resource extraction industry were installed at the top levels of the Forest Service, BLM and EPA. Decades of environmental legislation was undone with the stroke of a pen, drilling and mining permits flew out the window of the BLM offices, and preliminary plans were laid to bring the Holiest Grail of all - the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - into full scale oil production. Just as surely, however, the legal backlash quickly got into full swing, and one at a time the new policies that showed so much promise to wreak widespread havoc in 2001 were virtually all challenged in court, tied up, delayed, injunctioned and bogged down by 2003. After reading the extent to which the courts (and the activists who used the courts) foiled the GOP's attempted cut and run resource extraction rampage, I gained a new understanding of the vehemence of the anti-judiciary campaign launched by Rove and Co. during the second Bush term. They got their asses handed to them by the Judiciary Branch, and they were extremely upset.

The only bright spot for Cheney's score is his home state of Wyoming. As of 2007, Wyoming is the only place that has truly been irrevocably destroyed by the implementation of his ideas. Nearly 40,000 new natural gas wells have been drilled in the state, each one pumping millions of gallons of wastewater slurry into the ground every year to bring up the gas. If you tried to make a state uninhabitable, you could hardly come up with a better plan than scattering 40,000 drinking water contamination machines evenly over the countryside, virtually insuring that no well will remain un-poisoned by the year 2010. Even the positive points scored in Wyoming are not without a cost, however, as the massive environmental destruction has led to an unprecedented alliance between the conservative leaning outdoorsy types (hunters, fisherman, snowmobilers, etc.) and the liberal leaning outdoorsy organizations (Sierra Club, The Land Conservancy, etc.). Once the Big Energy gang has skimmed the cream and run off back to Texas, its hard to know if the alliance will last in the absence of a common enemy. However, for the moment, it looks like we have taken several decisive steps towards the magical day when the libertarian leaning, small government, state's rights, pro-gun Republicans realize that they have exactly zero shared interest with the mainstream national Republican party agenda.

Goal #2: Rape the Environment final score
Overall, Cheney's constituency has reaped a massive profit from the Wyoming extraction operations and the backlash seems minimal for the moment - so we are going to give him 9,639 positive points for the destruction of Wyoming. The conservative/liberal alliance that appears to be developing has great potential to negate his ideas in the future, but it is largely unrealized as of 2007 so it does not count for any negative points at the moment.

In the other venues outside Wyoming, the net result has clearly been a draw. All of his land destruction policies throughout the country were turned back through conventional court procedures, no large scale disasters ensued, and so there has been a minimum of backlash. Cheney gets out of goal #2 with a net positive 9,639 points, which makes it a cakewalk compared to the massive setbacks suffered by his first set of murder/enslavement goals. However, it is hard to imagine that he could be anything else but bitterly disappointed by the 90% failure rate of his energy plan to be executed.

Goal Number 3: Loot the Treasury
The billions of dollars in no-bid contracts secured by Halliburton during the first years of the Iraq war was a truly impressive bit of treasury looting - no doubt about it. Regardless of what happens in the future, that money is gone forever and we are just going to have to accept that he stole it fair and square.

As far as backlash goes, it appears to be pretty minimal at the moment. The GAO has done a lot of squaking, but the gargantuan flow of cash to Halliburton has continued uninterrupted. It will probably take several more years before the General Services Administration gets around to permanently debarring them (preventing them from bidding on government contracts), and we don't know exactly how much criminal behavior the Justice Department and SEC investigations are going to turn up. (Perhaps Halliburton will make the same mistake Enron did and fire the entire paper shredding staff as a cost cutting move while a Federal investigation is closing in on them - who knows?).

Halliburton recently gave us an important clue as to the outcome they are anticipating, when they announced that they were going leave Houston and flee the United States forever as soon as they can get the tent pegs pulled up. That's right - In March 2007 they casually mentioned that although they were confident that the four concurrent Federal investigations against them will turn up no wrongdoing, they were undertaking a "strategic relocation" to Dubai, moving their corporate headquarters, their CEO and all their senior management to that teeny little country on the Gulf side of Saudi Arabia, which, as it turns out, just so happens to not have an extradition treaty with the United States. It was all part of the plan they said, to focus more on the "growing business" in that part of the world.

Ooooohh...Dubai is way more fun than Texas I bet, I'm sure the CEO was thrilled to be moving his family there.

Goal Number 3: Loot the Treasury - Summary
Cheney's looting goals were pretty well realized for several years there, so he's going to get at least 9,461 points (and some satisfaction I'm sure) from those early days as VP.

We do, however, have to somehow account for the inevitable bankruptcy and destruction of Halliburton in our calculations, and this is where things get speculative. The General Services Administration may be slow, but they have the power to blacklist a contractor, and their hatred of Halliburton is well known. Best case, they will be merely banned from all future government contracts and go bankrupt. Worst case, they will get an Enron style public implosion and all the senior management will end up dead or in jail. This is all well and good, but without knowing just how deep the crater will be, how to you score it? How long to do you continue to count lost profits after the company has been wiped from the face of the Earth entirely?

We also have to somehow wrap some numbers around their banishment to the desert wastes of Dubai, a wild, cocaine fueled move that will certainly buy them some time by transforming the subpoena process into an extradition process, but leaves them 15,000 miles from their primary cash-cow client - the Pentagon.

Its all too boggling to me, so I'm just going to assign an arbitrary figure of negative 86,850 points for the flight from Texas, the debarment by the GSA and 5-7 year prison terms for the senior management and call it good. I just don't have a head for arbitrary-number-assignment math. Its been that way ever since I was a kid. I can, however, do a decent job with arbitrary geometry and arbitrary trigonometry if I really put my mind to it.

Go figure.

Grand total for the Loot the Treasury goals: 9,461 - 86,850 = -77,389

Grand Final Numerical Tally of the Meaning and Purpose of the Life of Richard Bruce Cheney

Major Life Goal Number One - Negative 34,350 points
Major Life Goal Number Two - Positive 9,639 points
Major Life Goal Number Three - Negative 77,389 points

Grand Total - Negative 102,100 points

Hmmmm...

Negative 102,100...

Tricky.

There are several basic reasons why any further analysis of this number is a truly mind-bending task:

1. Our conclusion defies all reason. We have mathematically proven that Dick Cheney's life of hard work, dedication, intelligence and sacrifice led directly to his most cherished goals and ideas suffering an enormous amount of irreparable damage. An entire building full of environmental lawyers, liberal journalists, civil libertarians, left-leaning judges and anti-war activists could never have dreamed of thwarting his hopes and dreams as effectively as he did himself - apparently with every action he took during every day of his life.

Despite how I might feel about this personally (pretty good...actually) it implies that the entire realm of "human effort" is mapped onto some type of weird existential Möbius strip thing that I'm not entirely sure I can deal with right now.

Would things have turned out better if he would have gotten the flu a few extra times and had to stay home from work for a couple of weeks?

Should he have gone on a few extra drunken benders, or better yet, just stayed home drunk his entire life to better serve his goals?

If we are living in a world where after a certain point the harder you work the more damage you do to your goals, what are the wider implications of this for everyone else's life - including my own?

Most importantly, however, is the question of whether or not this type of thing can be controlled. With proper training, could hard-charging highly ambitious men on a collision course with their own doom, detect (or be coached to detect) when their extraordinary efforts were propelling their goals the wrong direction? Is this a tangible point that can be identified? Is such a tactical reduction of effort humanly possible? Is there a machine or algorithm that could analyze such things and give a person hard numbers (times, dates etc.) to work with? Could high-powered people hire some kind of advisor or contractor to come in and calculate their pending existential backlash index, identify their action/effort/progress/ "sweet spot", and then apply just enough drag on their system (randomly stealing their papers, erasing their emails, losing their appointment book, causing their computer to crash, etc.) to keep them in "the zone"?

You tell me.

In the end, this casual bit of Cheney bashing has opened up a solar-system-sized can of worms (existential worms, no less) and I am just plain exhausted.

I have to stop while I still can.

I just have to get back to what I truly do know, which is that the slow-motion de-fanging of Dick Cheney over the last few years has left me very happy for reasons that I can't completely explain.

Very, very happy.


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