Is Cheney In The Throes Of Insanity?

Last week I initiated the Cyclops Award to be presented to a person who, as comedian Fred Allen described, “is so narrow-minded that if he fell on a pin-point, it would stick in both his eyes.” Cyclops is a creature of Greek legend who was known for brute strength and small mind who had one eye in the middle of his forehead. I indicated that Vice-President Dick Cheney was a prime candidate for the award.

Near the end of the second year of the Iraq War Cheney told the world that the insurgency, a few “dead-enders’ as his close buddy Don Rumsfeld described them, were “in the last throes” of their attacks against American troops. It is clearly evident today, three years later, that Cheney has fallen and punctured both his eyes. In 2005 he must have been in the last throes of sanity. He now demonstrates he has passed from the first throes of insanity to the final stages.

The fact is Cheney has never been right about anything concerning this historic foreign policy disaster. He said our troops would be welcomed as liberators; flowers in the barrels of our troops, so to speak. Actually, on the day Baghdad fell a few were. But things went to hell in a hurry. On the second day the Iraqis started to sack and loot everything of value in Baghdad, including much of their neighbor’s property. How could a few thousand American troops stop five million Iraqis from acting like they were investment bankers on Wall Street? Soon came the rocket-propelled grenades that tear off limbs and the improvised explosive devices that bounce brains around in their containers.

“Contemptuous Of Public Opinion”

Washington Post writers Barton Gellman and Jo Becker outlined Cheney’s character in a 2007 article: “He is pathologically secretive, treacherous towards colleagues, coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant president he serves, contemptuous of public opinion, and dismissive not only of international law but also of the very idea of the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior.”
Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker magazine is even tougher on the Darth Vader of the Lurch administration: “Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s political standing: the casual trashing of habeus corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law, the outright encouragement of ‘cruel,’ ‘inhuman,’ and ‘degrading’ torture, including waterboarding, which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq War itself.”
Cheney, who must have known his draft board’s address by heart, was once asked by Scott Hennen, WDAY’s Hannity and Limbaugh, what he thought of waterboarding. Cheney replied that “a little dunk in the water is a no-brainer for me.” Ah, what a tough brave hero to show such disdain for a torture invented by the Spanish Inquisition! Cheney, who hid out in academia from the Vietnam War after flunking out of Yale and having babies just at the right time, got five deferments in order to stay home. When he was asked about the five deferments, Cheney said he “had better things to do” than go to Vietnam. I wonder how many of the 58,000 listed on the Vietnam Memorial had said the same thing.

“The Law Says We Don’t Torture”

Cheney and his little band of fascists--Scooter Libby, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee, and the sad little weasel Alberto Gonzales--conspired to come up with new definitions of torture so that Lurch could say to the world, “We don’t torture.”

Of course we didn’t torture as long as we used our own definitions of what torture really was! First, this lovely little group redefined cruelty to fit their purpose: “Cruelty is defined as the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. Torture is an extreme version of cruelty.” After that manufactured interpretation, they got around to defining torture: “Torture is suffering equivalent in intensity to the pain of organ failure or even death.” That means we could interrogate someone, kill him “accidentally” in the process, and then say innocently: “Whoops! But we didn’t mean to destroy his kidneys or heart or fill up his lungs with water!” This definition was in opposition to all the military lawyers concerned with the Geneva Convention rules, allowing Lurch and Darth Vader to actually run around in public declaiming loudly that “the U.S. doesn’t torture!”

Remember Gilligan On His Little Island?

Cheney and his Mengele-inspired co-conspirators then opened up the United States to ridicule and international disgrace by developing cruel and unlawful interrogation techniques of prisoners at Saddam’s hellhole of Abu Ghraib. The use of biting dogs, absurd locked positions, extreme cold and heat, the humiliation of women’s underwear, and sexual harrassment by female interrogators became “legal.” Here we were, trying to gain the support of Muslim moderates in the entire Arab world so we shamed Muslim men by stripping them naked in front of women and forcing them to wear women’s underwear on their heads!

Perhaps you remember the Abu Ghraib picture that shocked the world. Here was an Iraqi prisoner, one of the “worst of the worst” according to “the greatest-secretary-of defense-who-ever-lived” Don Rumsfeld, perched precariously on a small box, hooded and barefoot, wearing some kind of cape or blanket, and wired like a homemade floor lamp and supposedly connected to an electric receptacle. He had been deprived of sleep for many hours and was told that if he fell off his “island” he would be electrocuted. American guards laughingly called him Gilligan, after the character in the TV show “Gilligan’s Island.” He was later released after enduring this Geneva Convention-busting treatment. We later released him, saying, “Sorry, I guess we had the wrong man.”

Testimony by our guards at Abu Ghraib and other Iraq prisons recorded by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris in their book “Standard Operating Procedure” outlined how broad and pervasive our abuse of prisoners had been. Under our “rules” (developed by Cheney’s crew), physical and mental abuse was conducted so the entire world could see we were just like Syria, Egypt, China, Iran’s Savak, and the old KGB. The two writers summed up our treatment of prisoners: “Sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory disorientation and the imposition of physical and pyschological pain.”

The Difference Between A Republican And A Conservative

Cheney has always tried to cast himself as a conservative, but his statements and voting record put him in the category of a politician who wants to stay in office. Does a conservative say “deficits don’t matter?” Although Cheney was very active in many responsible positions in Republican administrations, the last Republican president to balance a budget was Dwight Eisenhower. Doesn’t a conservative want to conserve? Cheney forced snowmobiles back into Yellowstone after Bill Clinton had banned them for good environmental reasons. He pushed for the increase of fees in national parks and wilderness areas to the point where middle class citizens could not afford to use camping and recreational facilities.

Cheney voted to ban all abortions even in cases of rape and incest. He opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. He opposed gays in the military although he has a lesbian daughter. While in Congress he voted against Head Start, child nutrition programs, and against the banning of cop killer bullets. Anything to stay on the good side of the National Rifle Association!

Franklin Delano Roosevelt reveled in the hatred of the country club set he actually belonged to. FDR from his wheelchair disposed of conservatives like Cheney with his famous grin: “A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs, who, however, has never learned to walk forward.”

Cheney Visits His Fantasyland

Can you imagine sending Dick Cheney on a diplomatic mission to Iraq and other Middle East countries? That’s like having Brittany Spears write a daily column on raising children. Of course, in previous visits Cheney has used phrases such as “phenomenal success”, “well worth the effort”, and “successful endeavor” about the Iraq War. Poor Cheney must have riled the “dead-enders” in Baghdad and Basra on his most recent trip. The Green Zone is currently getting the hell rocketed out of it and Basra seems to be the base of a civil war between the Shiite government and the Shiite militias. Lurch’s father once referred to the neocons who convinced his son to go to war against Saddam as “the crazies in the basement” (of the White House). Cheney is a charter member of that group. Through failure Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Don Rumsfeld are gone. Only Cheney and Condi Rice are left of the “Vulcans.”
In an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC TV last week, Cheney was reminded that the majority of Americans disapproved of the Iraq War and wanted out. His arrogant response: “So?” In other words, public be damned. George and I know better. (Lurch declared major combat was over when only three percent of our combat deaths were recorded. Over 3,850 have died after his flight-suit trip to the carrier.) Cheney has forgotten one simple but important fact about this country. Eventually the people decide to rule. But both his eyes have already been punctured by pin-points.