Dick of All Time: Cheney

I was all set to hand Harry Reid another D.O.W. for his crowded mantle to reward his latest and all-too-typical bedwetting routine, when—suddenly—a one-time Dark Lord crawled out of his cave (and supposed "retirement"), complete with a Bond villain's blood-filled eye, to once again use his secret satellite scrambler to commandeer the Earth's airwaves the supine media to broadcast his lies and threats across the globe. I don't have the time or energy to unpack the load of bullshit he dropped or diagnose the pathology behind his evil. Not when others have already done it, and better than I could...

I'll skip the blow-by-blow and laundry lists of lies for the big picture: Publius articulated the most disgusting part of Cheney's outlook and motive better than anyone else I saw...

There was one part of Cheney’s speech that disturbed me though. From listening to Cheney (and others), you get the sense that they are now rooting for another terrorist attack.

In that respect, Cheney’s speech was more than a retroactive defense of past criminal acts. He was looking ahead. He was setting up the political chessboard to attack Obama and the Democrats in a particularly poisonous way if – God forbid – we are attacked again.

It’s a pretty neat trick. The Bush/Cheney administration radicalizes a new generation of terrorists through actions like torture and unnecessary wars. Then, when the blowback comes, they’ll try to blame it on someone else – specifically, on the people trying to clean up their mess.

[...] One of the many problems with the Cheney/Geraghty logic is that the Bush administration’s methods can’t be judged strictly on short term results – just like the effects of smoking cigarettes can’t be judged purely in the short term. The blowback from these actions takes years or even decades to fully materialize (see, e.g., USSR vs. Afghanistan in the 1980s). God only knows, for instance, how many battle-hardened terrorists we’ve created and trained in the “classroom” of Iraq. And who knows what they’ll do.

But anyway, a terrorist attack will happen one day. When it does, Cheney and his followers announced today that they will seek to divide the country based on fear and hate and paranoia – just like they did in 2002.

There's no "will seek" about it, however. It's what they've done every day since 9/11, today, and for as long as it works. And, it works. Because half the country is braindead, and the supposed "liberal" media plays right along...

That's why headlines and media coverage like this piss me off so much.



This isn't a "debate." It's brinkmanship coupled with a seditious attack and a framejob. It's perjury by a fucking criminal trying to cover his ass and at the same time set up the serious man tasked with the nearly impossible—attempting to clean up one of history's all-time clusterfucks and lead a polarized and abused populace back from the brink of multiple crises—all a direct result of this very villain's damn-the-costs smash-and-grab actions in office.

And in their never-ending thirst for political "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!" coverage, the media is treating these two men and their remarks as somehow equal and as some kind of legitimate point/counterpoint. That headline might just as well read Obama, Limbaugh Debate Gitmo. Goddamn ridiculous.

There are only two media outlets worth a damn. The Daily Show and McClatchey/Knight-Ridder. Both put on an actual journalism clinic:

McClatchey: Cheney's speech contained omissions, misstatements

Stewart: May 21, 2009: American Idealogues

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