Tag Archives: Dick Cheney

Prosecute Dick Cheney? Yeah, Right….When Pigs Fly

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Kudos to the New York Times for having the stones to recommend that Dick Cheney and other officials of the administration of George W. Bush, should be prosecuted for war crimes.   Of course they should.  The feds should also throw a dozen or so big bankers in jail for committing fraud and crashing the economy in 2008.   But they haven’t and they won’t.   And nobody is going to prosecute Dick Cheney, and the editorial writers at the Times know it.

The big guys at the top almost always take care of one another.  In big business, how many of the CEO’s who have crashed big companies and then bailed out with golden parachutes have been prosecuted?   It’s endemic in our society and the same holds true for politics.  Ford, pardoned Richard Nixon, the Reagan Administration was never held accountable for prolonging the release of the American hostages in Iran in 1981, and and Mr. Obama, won’t condone a criminal prosecution of Dick Cheney.   If he did, a special prosecutor appointed by his new attorney general might have to haul a former president into court to testify.   There’s a precedent no sitting president wants to set.

Beyond that, can you even imagine the uproar from the right, claiming any prosecution of poor Dick Cheney and his inner circle was purely political?   Whitewater, Benghazi, Vince Foster and Monica Lewinsky combined don’t even being to touch it.

Being able to commit and benefit from horrendous acts, either economically or politically, and then walking away without reasonable accountability, may be at the heart of all that ails us as a people.

That doesn’t mean that putting the proposition out there has no value.   Not being able to act on the truth doesn’t mean we should deny it.  Denial, only makes matters worse by implying our tacit approval.   Like looking the other way while the Reagonites cut their deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages until Reagan had been sworn in back in 1981, or when Nixon’s gang of political thugs torpedoed the peace process in Vietnam to defeat Hubert Humphrey in 1968 .

Most Americans never even think about these things.   Denial, is so much easier.

Identifying The Enemy: Dick Cheney And The Neocon Right

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Dick Cheney’s latest assertion is that the world’s deal with Iran to control their development of nuclear power is akin to handing them nuclear weapons.   Of course Cheney, doesn’t put it quite that way, his assertion is that, “Obama’s about to give them nuclear weapons.”

Forget the other five major nations cutting the deal, in Cheney’s mind,  it’s all Obama’s fault.  That’s the blame-game the Republicans and their Neocon wingnuts have been playing for more than six years, and the game they continue to play, partly because there’s an election coming up, and partly because they are entirely fear-based thinkers.   Fear, is something they know how to use.

Instilling as much fear as possible in the hearts of all Americans was a most convenient technique for their power grab, with the Patriot Act at its center.

Fear-based thinking has taken us by the throat since a handful of crazies flew planes into the World Trade Center the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.   Admittedly, it was a terror creating situation and measures had to be taken.  However, letting fear dictate our actions going forward was entirely wrongheaded.    Giving the government absolute power through the Patriot Act, was perhaps the worst of all,  outstripping both the NSA and creation of the mammoth new and possibly unnecessary Department of Homeland Security.   But fear was dictating our actions and now the NSA  continues to conduct mass collection of what should be our private electronic messages with bogus “warrants” going out to cover tens of thousands of messages at a crack, while the military has the power to snatch any American off the street or out of his or her home without a warrant and without any appearance in any court,  sending them to a holding cell somewhere in Turkey where they can be imprisoned indefinitely without the assistance of counsel.

We’re supposed to be better than  this.

You can be “rendered” to some stinking cell in some foreign nation until you rot, and there is nothing you can do about it.   That, is absolute power.   To the best of my knowledge, the principles of “rendition” and the absence of any requirement for due process for someone suspected of having a connection to any kind of terrorist plot (whatever that might be)  have been extended with each new approval of the Defense Appropriations Act even though the Patriot Act has ceased to exist.   The situation is so confused and the waters so muddied that it’s difficult to know what’s happening with regard to the fear motivated attack on our constitutional rights.

This is what’s wrong with fear-based policy and it’s bastard child, absolute power.  It eliminates our freedom.   Moreover, once a government begins using fear to control the populace, it can’t stop.  If it does, if the populace returns to calm and sane thinking, then the government loses absolute control.    This isn’t anything new, it’s been axiomatic for years.   The Nazis used it as a prime motivator.  Throw a big enough scare into the populace and they’ll let you do almost anything that may or may not be necessary to protect the “homeland.”

We would do well to remember the words of Benjamin Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Hear, hear.   We would all be so much better off if Dick Cheney and his fear-based Neocon minions from hell would shutup and go away.  They’ve already done almost incalculable damage.   But the lightning is out of the bottle.  We have to somehow figure out a way to stick it back inside.  Or, conversely, we can put our absolute faith in the federal government, trusting them to do the right thing.