This week on the perpetual “news,” Donald Trump was trumped by the original Darth Vader, war criminal Dick Cheney, who delivers his lies with a certain gravelly timbre that can terrify the faint of heart.
Cheney, let us be clear, is responsible for the refugee crisis now sweeping Europe. He’s the man who engineered the complete revamping of U.S. foreign policy from one of incremental gains through diplomacy to war, war and more war.
These wars have killed hundreds of thousands in the Middle East and the refugee camps of innocent civilians seeking to escape the cauldron that Iraq had become due to the unprovoked U.S. invasion have been on the borders of Syria and Jordan for over a decade.
Only now, with the ISIS terrorists being the manifestation of Cheney’s darkest interiors, the refugee situation has gone totally out of control.
One thing to bear in mind, it is unclear whether Cheney can freely travel outside the U.S. without being arrested and jailed pending a trial on crimes against humanity. There is almost no tyrant or murderer on the globe who is more qualified for a such a fate than Dick Cheney.
His ties to Halliburton, for example, are just one more area where the pliant media failed to hold his administration to account over a decade ago, and damning evidence that has been produced since has been contained to the margins of the public conscience.
Cheney is akin to a kraken of legendary magnitude, a giant and sinister sea squid who leaves chaos, pain and death in its wake.
The fact that he walks freely on the streets of Washington, D.C., that he is still treated with civility by officialdom here, and especially by the media, is a testament to how cowed and limp our nation’s leaders, including its media leaders, have become.
It’s nothing but kid gloves for the angry kraken!
Steve Benen, an MSNBC blogger, made big news of the blatant lie that Cheney tried to pass off in a Fox News interview last weekend when he claimed that the production in Iran from zero to 5,000 nuclear centrifuges in operation “happened on Obama’s watch.”
Fox News’ Chris Wallace shocked the vice president, undoubtedly expecting his Fox News lap dogs to overlook the lie, when he didn’t let the lie pass, but instead corrected him with the truth that all the growth occurred during the Bush-Cheney years.
“If I were Cheney, I’d feel humiliated by the truth, too,” Benen wrote. “The underlying challenge for the failed former V.P. is the degree to which his own Iran policy failed spectacularly.”
Then columnist Dana Milbank wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post that Cheney had the gall in remarks to the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday to question “the veracity of the president’s (Obama’s) claims” associated with the Iran nuclear deal coming before Congress this week, and to label several of Obama’s claims as “simply false.”
Now, this is the man, this Cheney, who bullied all of official Washington into believing what he knew was a lie, the specious claim that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction” at known locations in Iraq.
It was he who also sought to sell a connection between al Qaeda and the attacks of 9-11 and Iraq in his push for an unprovoked war. And, as Milbank reported, he was at it again this week. “He unabashedly made allegations against Iran Tuesday that he once made against Iraq, citing evidence of ‘an agreement between the Iranian government and al Qaeda.” Milbank wrote.
One can only shudder when thinking of what the world would look like now if the perpetuation of the Cheney madness had continued after 2008.
There is no doubt that he and his cohort dogs of war, who were making military intrusions into Iran during the Bush-Cheney years, are livid that President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have so effectively thwarted their sordid intentions for that whole part of the world.
Going into the next presidential cycle, carting out the spectre of the Cheney kraken will help to drive that point home. He and the current GOP field are almost interchangeable.