Monday, May 11, 2009

Cheney's Media Torture

After eight years in the Bush bunker, the former Vice-President is out waterboarding voters with interviews to make them confess that electing Barack Obama was a plot to subvert national security.

Dick Cheney capped his first hundred days as a voluble has-been with a "Face the Nation" appearance yesterday to illustrate Murray Kempton's classic definition of politicians as generals who watch the battle from afar and come down afterward to shoot the wounded.

His main target was a real general, Colin Powell, whose injuries leading up to the Iraq war were inflicted by Cheney's own twisted Scooter Libby intelligence used in Powell's speech to persuade the UN that Saddam Hussein had WMDs.

Asked to choose between Powell and Rush Limbaugh to represent Republican principles, Cheney did not hesitate to side with The Mouth, saying "my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican."

More and more, Cheney is looking like one of those Japanese soldiers discovered in caves long after World War II ended to emerge blinking in the daylight, convinced that their emperor was still on the throne. The difference is that they slunk off in silence, too shamed to be giving interviews.

1 comment:

(O)CT(O)PUS said...

"Cheney is looking like one of those Japanese soldiers discovered in caves long after World War II ended to emerge blinking in the daylight, convinced that their emperor was still on the throne."

Way too generous. What Cheney is trying to undo:

The Nuremberg Trials, 1945-46
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
Nuremberg Principles, 1950
Convention on the Abolition of the Statute of Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, 1968
The Geneva Convention, 1949
Geneva Convention Supplementary Protocols, 1977
The International Law Commission, 1950

Civilization is tenuous at best, and all we have are legal precedents that bind us to core principles. Once we ignore this body of law, we turn into savages once more … having learned nothing from history.

Cheney is a dangerous man trying to save his own neck by convincing a rabble that International Law means nothing.