Dick Cheney, War Criminal. We Deserve Your Silence

Recently, Dick Cheney appeared on ABC's "This Week", followed up by a surprise visit to CPAC, and a mild heart attack. Many well wishes went out to the former Vice President, even some from those who disagree with him politically. While I don't wish for his death or infirmity, it's difficult for me to consider why anyone of any sound moral character would publicly send well wishes to this reprehensible disgrace of a person. He's undeserving of them. Dick Cheney should be a national pariah. Dick Cheney should be in jail.

When I saw an except of Mr. Cheney on "This Week", I wondered what would have been the reaction if a similar platform had been given to Hitler, or Pol Pot, to brag, as Cheney did, about their endorsement and culpability in war crimes. And for those with the stunted intellect to argue that waterboarding isn't torture, I suggest they peruse this article. While it's unlikely to change such minds, I can hope that it might simply make them puke.

Mr. Cheney's patriotism is as phony as Sean Hannity's machismo. It wasn't enough to lie us into war and cause the needless deaths of thousand of Americans and ten of thousands of Iraqis; Mr. Cheney advocated policies that put us on par with the Nazis and the Khmer Rogue. It wasn't enough to taint our reputation as a society of laws; Mr. Cheney has reveled in recalling his part in perverting our system of justice, his conversation sometimes sounding like the sociopaths who are featured in life-in-prison documentaries. Despite his nearly pathological penchant for being wrong, he's given a stage, amplification, lights, cameras, and the opportunity to add his disreputable, debased, and debunked two cents on our national security. Why?

The Bush Administration's choice to use torture, to fabricate a despotic, objugatory, legal netherworld, to act out the revenge fantasies of frightened adolescents who've watched too many hours of "24", has done nothing other than to hamstring and trap us, and give our enemies exactly what they wanted: an America that abandons its norms, values, and way of life. Mr. Cheney and the Republican (and Democrat) acolytes who've supported some type of extralegal process to adjudicate these suspects, fight against criminal trials in civilian courts because torture has queered the cases, and like the cowards they are, rather than admit this truth, they obfuscate, demagogue, and grandstand. And Dick Cheney beams proudly about the fact he's savaged our legal traditions and wiped the bottom of his shoes on the Constitution.

It's fairly obvious by now there will be no one from the Bush Administration held accountable for these actions. For the most part, the principals have gone on to bigger and better. Jay Bybee is a federal judge. John Yoo, a professor and editorial writer. George W. Bush is writing a book, and Mr. Cheney gloats about breaking the law. If there's no other justice to be delivered, can we at least not give deference or respect to these individuals who've smeared our national image and left us this terrible conundrum? Can we not give them unchallenged opportunities to continue to spread their lies about foiling plots that were never remotely close to fruition? Can we please, in the name of decency, not give them the newspaper columns or the broadcast airtime to boast about torture, a war crime, a crime in and of itself, being effective and necessary?

Can we please be spared the shameless reprobate Dick Cheney.

Fail. Lose. Fail.

President Obama and the Democratic leadership still don't get it. They've finally decided to cut away from the joke of getting Republican support for the Health Care Reform bill, perhaps even using reconciliation to fix some unpalatable aspects of the Senate version. Their ballsiness and bravado is at least eight months late.

It may well be that political scientists will someday study Mr. Obama's approach to getting this legislation passed and determine it to be one of the worst political endeavors ever undertaken by the Democrats. They've thoroughly hosed this one up.

This mishmash of protectionism and social safety-net finds little support among the American people. The Republicans have successfully demonized it, and their disciplined slow-walk has resulted in a public perception of the Democrats as being, yet again, impotent, inept and utterly tone-deaf to the will of the public.

The Right hates the cost and the expansion of government, the Left sees it as yet another blatant bow to corporatism as evidenced by the deals with Big Pharma and the absence of the public option.

When this is all analyzed at some future date, it will be the failure to enact a true public option that will insure that this bill is a political loser. Poll after poll showed, across the board, Americans were willing to embrace a bill that contained a true public option: an option that allowed you, if you were dissatisfied with your insurance company, to buy into something like Medicare. Is there anyone who doesn't think such an option wouldn't work as a significant check against the excesses of the insurance cartel? This bill gives us mandates, and no such choice. I don't know what members of Congress think, but I believe that equals a whole lot of throw the bums out, and the Republican bums aren't voting for this.

Washington as a whole is an expert in misreading the tea leaves of national sentiment. They've done it yet again, and may have insured the Obama presidency will be a failure. How does that happen with large Congressional majorities and the smartest guys in years, being in power? The future may have to answer that one, too.