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Dick Cheney - Source: Reuters -
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Every New Yorker knows the sight, and the sound; massing police sirens, gridlocked traffic, and dozens of white and blue Chevvy Impala or Dodge Charger police cars lined up, their flashers on, the officers standing around, and talking.
Periodically the NYPD runs these anti-terror drills. An address gets disseminated, with the order: Get there as fast as you can. All hell (traffic hell, one of the levels Dante omitted to describe as it was too awful, the one reserved for impatient New Yorkers) duly breaks loose.
It's an inconvenience; you're likely to not make your appointment on the West Side of Manhattan because of it, your cab driver is cursing to his friend in Bangalore, or wherever he's on the phone to, but you feel just a little safer.
A piece of street theatre perhaps, but it's one that Dick Cheney might approve of. Bloodied in the Nixon administration, rising to final prominence as George Bush's Vice President, Dick Cheney is commonly agreed to be the power that ran the Oval Office's War on Terror during W's administration. He is reviled by many as a man who trampled the constitution and legal due process in his prosecution of that conflict.
Today Cheney did what he has done periodically. He attacked the Obama administration, and the President in particular, for not taking terrorism seriously, and for trying to close Guantanamo Bay internment camp, sometimes called America's Gulag. The soundbite in reference to Obama is particularly piquant, "Why doesn't he want to admit that we are at war?"
This comes after the botched attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , with help from Yemeni al-Qaeda operatives, to blow up North West Airlines Flight 253 earlier in the week. A strong argument can be made that the Obama administration's handling of this failed terror attack has been on a par with the attack itself, from Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano's absurd comment - initially - that the system worked well, to Obama's diffident response. Some are calling this a 72 hour power vacuum.
And Dick Cheney, like nature, abhors a vacuum, especially in one of political power.
Already the White House has responded to the ex-Vice President, and Obama's allies in the popular press have pointed out that two men recently found to be prominent in the Yemeni al-Qaeda structure were actually released from Guantanamo on the orders of, well, George W Bush, and - by inference - Dick Cheney.
This alters Cheney's attack not a whit. You see, he didn't approve of that particular policy, which came towards the end of Bush's reign, and when he was struggling to roll back the use of Guantanamo.
For Dick Cheney, savaging both the Democratic President he disapproves of, and the Republican President he putatively worked for in one fell swoop is not an oversight, it's vintage awesomeness.
And it's what you would expect from the man who picked many of those who ran the Bush White House, then staffed his own office with people whom they regarded as their mentors and seniors. Power travels from the top down, and it never apologises.
My bet is that the scene I opened with, to the power of five, was repeated in Times Square today when a parked unoccupied 1982 white Dodge van was labeled "suspicious" by cops. Authorities shut down the midtown strands of Broadway and Seventh Ave, and emptied out the Nasdaq, and Conde Nast buildings nearby.
Later, the van was found to contain not explosives as feared, but clothes. Had the reverse been true, Dick Cheney, whom so many believe is a paranoiac, would have been proved right on one crucial issue - justifiable paranoia.
And that deafening sound would have been the applause of the one million people expected to gather in Times Square to herald the New Year in the US, and what so many used to believe was the ushering in of a new era.
Read more of Tim Wilson's blogs.
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