Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:13 pm
It seems that after a merciful but few weeks without the grim nagging of ex Vice President Dick Cheney and his dutiful daughter, we are about to be treated to another round. Oh goody — a book, a book tour, and the Cheneys on parade — again. Aren’t ex V. P.’s supposed to go away somewhere and be quiet?
They certainly are not supposed to attempt to chip away at the foundation of the newly elected government — but that is exactly what he is doing, and I find it astonishing. His motivations are clear — at the heart of this the man is utterly terrified and does not want to spend the rest of his life behind bars for High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
So he and his family are waging the fight of their lives. Unfortunately, their target is the President of the United States. This is not what is needed at this perilous time, but Mr. Cheney has made it clear that his priority is Himself. He has always served the Special Few, and in his world view, he is the Man, the Only One that knows the score. He treats his fellow humans with thin-lipped contempt and arrogance. Every time that man speaks, an angel dies.
I believe that Dick Cheney is a rapidly metastasizing cancer upon the body politic. President Obama has been very gracious — perhaps too gracious regarding the matter of that old Dick. Mr. Cheney is unrepentant regarding the issues of torture and wars of choice, and utterly convinced of the rightness of his actions. He thinks Mr. Obama is weak, effete, an “elite”. At the bottom of his heart there is only fear.
He literally has become known, even internationally (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/24/dick-cheney-washington-return) as “Lord Vader” and is laughingly but seriously referred to worldwide as the symbol of Evil. This troubled, possibly sociopathic man is poisoning the spiritual waters of our nation.
Ten years ago the issue of torture would not have come up for discussion — at all. The civilized world, aching from the violence of World War II, agreed in 1947 that we just didn’t torture – anyone. Now, thanks largely to Cheney’s fear-mongering and his statements that torture actually produces actionable intelligence, somewhere around 40% of the American population thinks that torture just might be justifiable. That, my friends, is an indication of the corruption of the American Spirit. (http://www.care2.com/causes/politics/blog/the-publics-growing-acceptance-of-toture-is-equivalent-to-the-suicide-of-americas-soul/?808986b1bdaba18fecef146c10f9d24d#comment-166340)
All geeks know that the President represents another archetype entirely — the Vulcan “Spock”. Logical and pragmatic, he doesn’t want to destroy his chances of reform before they’ve reached fruition; many of us understand that. Our nation remains deeply divided, and a trial of the highest leaders of the former administration could rip this country into pieces, but the things that Dick and Liz Cheney are saying about the new President and his young administration are beyond the pale.
The insult to the Presidency, to the Nation, is too great. If Cheney’s view prevails, and torture becomes an accepted paradigm, then the best of what America has striven to represent — America’s Soul, its sense of itself as a spiritualized collective, will suffer for decades – hell, it is lost! Cheney’s world view belongs “in the dustbin of history”, and his constant sorties against the Presidency must be met with greater fire by the President’s defenders.
By Cheney’s own standards, he SHOULD be in the pen. He was, after all, arguably Mastermind-in-Chief of the whole Iraq debacle. It only took a few stubborn, delusional men to start a war wherein hundreds of thousands of lives have been destroyed. When Cheney talks with such disdain for the grunts from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal I can’t help but imagine him in a nice bunker-like cell.
He has no sympathy for those small-potato soldiers, not one bit, referring to them as the few “bad apples” responsible for everything that went wrong. In fact they represented but the tip of the iceberg, and anyone paying attention knows that whatever has gone down in those undisclosed locations is so bad they still don’t want us to know about it. And yet Cheney unequivocally advocates those unspeakable practices.
In my opinion that makes him an active threat to our national security. I shudder to think about Dick and Liz on their merry book tour, promoting his vile policies as though they had merit. The whole world will be watching as he continues to instruct our population regarding the necessity of that which is inherently evil.
I am profoundly disturbed by the growing ambivalence among my fellow Americans about torture. The attitudes of a person like Dick Cheney are a vestige of more savage times rightly rejected by the majority of civil societies. While President Obama has shown he can take care of himself, and many, many military people have supported him, Cheney refuses to be silenced, continuing to justify what is fundamentally unjustifiable.
I believe that this man deserves to be in prison, in one of those undisclosed locations, more than any other man imaginable to me. Why is he still free to poison the airwaves as though he were a responsible statesman, as opposed to somebody who should be tried for war crimes? Ask yourself – or better yet, ask your Representative.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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