Leadership Quote by Dick Cheney

What Cheney offers here isn’t a confession so much as a controlled burn: a glimpse of intent framed in the soft padding of bureaucratic speech. “I think there’s no question but what” performs certainty while pretending to deliberate, a lawyerly throat-clearing that signals, to allies, confidence and, to critics, plausible deniability. He names the “Bush-Cheney administration” twice, an odd redundancy that reads like ownership and insulation at once: yes, we were in charge; no, don’t isolate me from the machine.

The key phrase is “took steps specifically geared.” It’s technocratic on purpose. “Steps” is bloodless; “specifically geared” suggests calibration, not ideology. That’s the subtext: deregulation as engineering, not politics. Then comes the tell: “try and free up the financial sector.” “Free up” is a euphemism that smuggles a moral claim into a practical verb. Freedom sounds virtuous; removing constraints sounds like modernizing. It avoids naming what’s being removed (oversight, capital requirements, enforcement appetite) and who benefits when finance is “freed” (large institutions, dealmakers, the risk-takers insulated by complexity and, historically, by rescue).

Context matters: the late Bush years are haunted by the 2008 crisis and the broader deregulatory arc that predated it but accelerated through a pro-market governing style. Cheney’s line reads like a retrospective defense aimed at normalizing that trajectory: we acted intentionally, and we did it in service of liquidity and growth, not recklessness. The irony is that the language of liberation becomes an alibi. By choosing abstraction over specifics, he narrates deregulation as inevitability - a necessary loosening - rather than a choice with consequences that landed, brutally, outside the financial sector.