Shoe Bomber Richard Reid – Poster Child for Dick Cheney’s Hypocrisy

This morning on NBC’s Meet the Press, Vice President Joe Biden responded to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s attacks on the Obama Administration’s handling of accused Christmas Day terrorist bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.  As Biden accurately stated, Cheney is “”not entitled to rewrite history. He’s not entitled to his own facts“, correctly pointing out that the Bush Administration also prosecuted shoe bomber Richard Reid in a civilian court.  This author just commented this past week on the duplicity with which you and other Republicans are terrorizing the American people over this nonsense, after your Administration tried over 150 terrorists in civilians courts – including one of the 9/11 co-conspirators.

This blog contains a number of entries addressing Cheney’s constant attacks on the current Administration, and why he has absolutely no standing to criticize Obama; particularly because of the hypocrisy pertaining to the decisions and policies of the Bush Administration – specifically, their failure to prevent the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and the subsequent blunder that led to Osama bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora, Afghanistan ninety days later.

Playing armchair psychologist is fraught with dangers of misdiagnosis, as well as the tendency towards over-generalization of certain symptoms as definitive indicators of a specific pathology.  Nevertheless, and admittedly at the risk of the cognitive dissonance in ignoring my own advice to the contrary, I will venture a psychological explanation on why Dick Cheney’s persistent revisionist history reveals the depth of his pathological dissonance.  Which may be why Cheney is rated the most unpopular Vice President in modern history – even surpassing Dan Quayle (say it ain’t so Dick).

“If an action has been completed and cannot be undone, then the after-the-fact dissonance compels us to change our beliefs.”  What most often occurs in the aftermath of undeniable factual evidence of an action that betrays our personal beliefs or opinions is a growing increase in dissonance in direct relationship to “the importance of the subject to us, how strongly the dissonant thoughts conflict, and our inability to rationalize and explain away the conflict.

In other words, when we cannot reconcile our beliefs and opinions with the undeniable existence of facts that contradicts them, we defend our position even more zealously.   Denial of the Holocaust by people like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – who ironically may be Jewish - is a stark  example of this behavior.

It is William Shakespeare’s often misquoted poetic commentary [as in the body of the subject line of this entry] that is the most famous historical observation on this human condition:

“The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.”