Stephens Hayes Hearts Dick Cheney

by Taylor Marsh

Ho-boy. This guy just never gives up. Neither does Dick, for that matter, forever ignoring his own words and history as he tries to cement his image for posterity, with a little help from his fans. Prep for this post begins with the interview between Jon Stewart and Stephen Hayes. Yeah, yeah, Stephen wrote a book. Woo-hoo! It's about Dick. Okay. His promotional tour for it is the stuff of author's dreams. Meet the Press is rarely offered to progressive authors. The Hayes propaganda tour continues beyond Fox "News" in The Wall Street Journal. You've got to love his tenacity for ignoring the truth. It's positively muscular.

Dick Cheney sat transfixed by the images on the small television screen in the corner of his West Wing office. Smoke poured out of a gaping hole in the World Trade Center's North Tower. John McConnell, the vice president's chief speechwriter, sat next to him and said nothing.

Then, a second plane appeared on the right-hand side of the screen, banked slightly to the left, and plunged into the South Tower. "Did you see that?" Mr. Cheney asked his aide.

A little more than an hour later, Mr. Cheney was seated below the presidential seal at a long conference table in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, better known as the bunker. When an aide told Mr. Cheney that another passenger airplane was rapidly approaching the White House, the vice president gave the order to shoot it down. The young man was so surprised at Mr. Cheney's immediate response that he asked again. Mr. Cheney reiterated the order. Thinking that Mr. Cheney must have misunderstood the question, the military aide asked him a third time.

The vice president responded evenly. "I said yes." ... ..

The Cheney Imperative
By STEPHEN F. HAYES

Of course, listeners of my radio show know exactly where I'm going with this one.

Ah yes, Mr. Hayes paints Cheney as the decisive one on 9/11, commanding that a plane be shot out of the air. Feel the drama. Sense the ... unmitigated load of crap.

The Norad tapes prove a completely different reality than the yarn Hayes is telling. But wingnuts have been floating this revisionist 9/11 history for a very long time. However, facts are stubborn things, especially when there's Norad tape to back them up.

In his bunker under the White House, Vice President Cheney was not notified about United 93 until 10:02 -- only one minute before the airliner impacted the ground. Yet it was with dark bravado that the vice president and others in the Bush administration would later recount sober deliberations about the prospect of shooting down United 93. "Very, very tough decision, and the president understood the magnitude of that decision," Bush's then chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC News.

Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either.

President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which -- though no one knew it at the time -- was 15 minutes after the attack was over. ... ..

9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes

Does The Wall Street Journal care about Hayes's fictional account of Dick Cheney on 9/11? Absolutely not. They're part of the wingnut radio theory of Republican truth, terror and propaganda: grab the reader or listener by their emotions and never let go. Craft the image and build the facade big enough and the public will not only never doubt you, but follow you anywhere. It's been effective, because the myth is always more satisfying than the truth, especially during the Bush-Cheney era.

This isn't the first outing for Stephen Hayes's fiction. With outlets like the WSJ and "Meet the Press," and let's not forget Fox "News," pimping his fiction, it likely won't be the last.

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