The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy
By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor
Although the recent obsequies for heartless warmonger Dick Cheney were restrained in their enthusiasm for the one of this century's leading war criminals, some of them did mention that at the end of his life he spoke out against the Mad King.
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| Thanks, Dick! |
In fact his attack on the Tangerine-Faced Fascist was ignored by every single Republican, including those in his home state of Wyoming, who repudiated him and replaced his daughter with an insane Trump taint-polisher.
If only George W. Bush had shown the same resistance to Dead-eye Dick's nonsense, hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis might be alive today and hundreds of thousands more, like Sen. Tammy Duckworth, might still have their arms and legs.
He died pretty much forgotten by a populace weary of neocon warmaking. It would be a mistake though not to mark his demise because, as others have noticed, his combination of lawlessness, bullying, corruption, and lies lives on in the party that rejected him in favor of more demonstrative bigots. There was also some sense that Cheney represented a great tradition of mainstream Republicanism that has sadly and surprisingly vanished in the era of the Mad King.
We'll agree with the first part, but as to the second we submit that the differences between the Cheney Regime and the current Fascist coup against America are at most ones of style and degree.
“Dick Cheney is the godfather of the Trump presidency,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “Trump is unchained because Dick Cheney had been at war for half a century against the restraints put in place after Vietnam and Watergate. He believed that action was more important than following constitutional rules.”
The only thing we'd quibble with is the implication that the restraints on an imperial Presidency only came into existence in the 1970's. In fact, they are contained in Article II of the Constitution, which grants surprisingly limited powers to what Dead-eye Dick's apologists called the “unitary Presidency.”
The Nation had a fair and balanced assessment of Dead-eye’s career:
That’s really the point: it’s not just that Dick Cheney was a monstrous human being – he was – it’s that he paved the way for today’s Republican coup against America by pulling out of his sagging ass an entirely invented doctrine about an all-powerful Presidency and then using that assumed power to commit unspeakable crimes.
We can skip over his formative years as a mainstream Republican functionary, when he apparently concocted the hallucination that Crooked Dick Nixon had gotten a bum rap and all this separation-of-powers and rule-of-law crap was just so much water under the board.
In 2000, he persuaded a credulous, stupid, inadequate Republican pol named George W. Bush that he could relieve him of the burden of working on or even comprehending national security and foreign policy matters in much the same way that George’s daddy had relieved him of the burden of serving his country in the Vietnam War.
After Bush won the election by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court, Cheney installed himself as the viceroy of the Bush Regime, aided immensely by his equally evil partner in crime, Don Rumsfeld, who served, so to speak, as Secretary of Defense.
His first goal was to unravel the policy of detente with Russia pioneered by his idol St. Ronald of Bitburg. He was so preoccupied with this pointless exercise that he utterly failed to appreciate the real threat to the United States.
Counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke was so worried about al-Qaeda’s threats to strike in America, relayed to him by the CIA and other intelligence sources, that he desperately tried to bring their concerns to Dick Cheney’s attention. Cheney, too busy with humiliating Russia, avoided him as long he could. Finally, Clarke got a high level meeting: on September 4, 2001. Nothing was done.
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| No torture here, said Dick |
When confronted by his utter failure to protect America from al-Qaeda, Cheney lied, saying Clarke had never warned him. Seven email memos state otherwise.
On 9/11, in addition to cancelling his meeting with Clarke, Cheney assumed absolute power at the White House while the real President was being ferried around the country on Air Force One, copy of “My Pet Goat” in hand. In the fanciful account of that day in Cheney’s New York Times obit, the paper of record applauded his “steady hand” at the White House.
That wasn’t true either. In fact he tried to make a number of Bat Guano-like decisions, including one to shoot down civilian aircraft approaching Washington, which had to be countermanded by functionaries like Josh Bolten who gently reminded Dead-eye Dick that he wasn’t the President and that the real President was available by secure datalinks to make such momentous calls.
After bungling 9/11 and lying about it, Cheney realized that it provided an opportunity not only to aggrandize the U.S. by making wars on little countries supposedly too weak to fight back, like Iraq and Afghanistan, but also to dissolve the institutional and constitutional restraints on the exercise of Presidential power, like the supposed power to torture.
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| Another Cheney lie |
Cheney and Rumsfeld unleashed their bent lawyers on the Department of Justice, who duly delivered a ridiculous justification of torture as being OK as long as the victim did not die or remain permanently crippled.
There was and is a clear definition of torture in U.S. law:
“torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.
18 U.S.C. § 2340(1)
Despite these simple and clear words contained in black-letter law,
[Yoo] wrote the infamous Bush-era “Torture Memos.” Today, John Yoo and his work are — in the words of one source close to Donald Trump — seen as a “guiding light” by MAGA lawyers and other Trump lieutenants who are seeking to form the legal foundations necessary for making a second Trump administration as wrathful and as unchained as possible.
Based on this fraudulent memo, Cheney always insisted that the United States did not employ torture, despite perpetrating outrages like this:
Four such stories, based almost exclusively on information taken from the Senate torture report, are shared below. They don't include the detainees forced to stand on broken legs, endure ice water baths, or undergo "rectal rehydration" (in reality, rape) at the hands of interrogators, at least one of whom had anger management issues while another "reportedly admitted to sexual assault." These stories represent just a fraction of the prisoners profiled in the report, including at least 26 individuals wrongfully detained even according to the CIA's unlawful standards.
But together, they represent many of the worst elements of the program – the abuse itself, the breakdown in oversight, the preference for merciless brutality over credible intelligence gathering, and the complicity of the highest levels of government.
The other stories include a detainee who died from hypothermia after being shackled with no pants, a German national detained and mistreated by mistake, repeated beatings of a detainee, and beatings and 5 days of sleep deprivation of a detainee that yielded no useful intelligence.
Which is of course our point: Cheney and his remorseless immoral sadistic campaign for unlimited Presidential power to bomb and abuse anyone he sees fit brought us to our current plight.
Fun fact, though: even Torture Guy Woo isn’t buying the Mad King’s current policy of murdering people in boats on the high seas whom someone says might be engaged in drug smuggling. But he helped build the legal foundation for such barbarism, so you can give Woo a cookie. I won’t.
As grisly and unlawful as Cheney and Rummy’s torture campaign was, it pales in the harm it caused next to their promotion of a terrible bloody and pointless war in Iraq, based on lies concocted by Cheney and Rumsfeld in part by bullying the bureaucracy to bend the facts to fit their lust for violence.
They manipulated and falsified intelligence to buttress their lies that Hussein was somehow involved in 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction. Then they selectively leaked those lies to credulous reporters who duly reprinted them in places like The New York Times, thus covering their bulls*** with a spray tan of credibility. The lies still stank though.
And like Republicans ever since, Cheney not only lied repeatedly and unrepentantly; he tried to smear and destroy the lives of those who dared to speak the truth. When Valerie Plame's husband dared to contradict his bulls*** story about Saddam supposedly buying uranium in Africa, Cheney ordered Plame's identity as a covert CIA agent leaked to a neocon columnist, endangering not only her but her network of spies, some working in harm's way. And as noted above, he falsely tried to blame Clarke for his administration's failure to react to pre-9/11 intelligence.
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| Yeah, but if it's raining, who wants to go? |
In so doing, he modeled the behavior of the current generation of lying Republican autocrats, who not only refuse to take responsibility for their failures but respond with personal smears (if not indictments) to demean their critics.
But on this Veteran's Day we recall one last parallel between dead Cheney and the current Mad King: like the cowardly bullies they were, they avoided any military service while glorifying violence and treating our troops as disposable props for their theater of cruelty. Cheney sent hundreds of thousands of ill-trained ill-equipped National Guard troops into multiple bloody tours of duty in Iraq.
His successor the Mad King takes every opportunity to demean the military, from refusing to honor the fallen at a cemetery in France because it would muss his grotesque comb-over to telling his adviser, John Kelly, whose son fell in service to our country, that such brave souls were “suckers and losers.”
The neocon chorus who carried the bags for Dead-eye Dick want us to believe now that the rise of the Republican Mad King represents an inexplicable break from the great Republicans who preceded him. If you believe that, then you are just another one of the Republicans' “suckers and losers.”
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