Dick Cheney for president? Will lunacy triumph?

Re-posted from Plunderbund


Like Mack the Knife, Dick Cheney is back in town.  He and his daughter Liz have announced a new non-profit group called Alliance for a Strong America to shame Barack  Obama's presidency.   And if your thing is the Theater of the Absurd then you have to believe that every rich Obama hater in the land with some loose change will drop a few coins  in his cup.

And if anything is deserving of a Saturday Night Live schtick, you could spread the rumor that Cheney, so full of sound and fury,  is again stirring up media coverage because he's actually running for president to restore our unique position as the global sheriff. Sounds silly, I know.  But with  the former veep who always operates beyond the limits of reality, silliness has no meaning.  We  can even envision a scenario in which he attaches Liz to his ticket as his running-daughter. It would dispel the notion among anyone who shudders at his name that he is a cold-blooded lunatic.  Instead, he would come across as a tender loving family guy who merely wants to see his daughter get ahead.

Karl Rove  would immediately predict a landslide victory for Cheney.  And Donald Trump would be thrilled that we finally had a white guy in the Oval Office who was born in America.

 And in swing-state Ohio. the projected turnout  for our new hero on Election Day would be so large in even the smallest counties  that Secretary of State Jon Husted would alert all of the local election boards to remain open around the clock by Labor Day for early voting.

If I all of this sounds too crazy for words, you can't say I didn't warn you.  Did I mention that a lunatic is on the loose again?

And what did Daddy do to uphold our honor, Liz?

SHOULDN'T LIZ CHENEY be a tad more selective in her choice of rant against President Obama's foreign policy when she says that it "dishonors this nation and the brave men and women who have fought and died for our freedom ." The loquacious daughter of the former vice president can whip up a conservative audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. But it also whips up the fact that hawkish Dick Cheney, hardly a brave soldier, got five deferments from military service because, he said, he had other priorities.

Life on the maniacal front

THE VOTE IS IN, AND by a tally of 1-0, Glenn Beck has been narrowly elected as the Maniac of the Week. He outlasted Karl Rove and Liz Cheney by a single slur. More about them later.

As he has shown in the past, Beck's need for public attention, a deranged cry for help that doubtless arose in his near-drowning years ago in a rain puddle, is no thing of beauty. (On the other hand, he's lucky. Turkeys are known to drown in rain puddles because they are too dumb to raise their heads). This week, against strong competition , Beck again exposed his pathetically vacuous self by taking on America's churches. Atheists have done that, too, albeit with more restraint, but Beck is no atheist (He's a Mormon, obviously still a work in progress.) According to this Fox News payroller, anybody who attends a church that has a regard for social justice is either a Nazi or a Communist. He wants these churchgoers to flee their contaminated pews immediately.

Next in line for the Maniac of the Week Award is Liz Cheney, one of William Kristol's stable of immortals, who has publicly accused Justice Department lawyers who are defending accused terrorists of being the "al-Qaeda 7" and the Justice Department as the "Department of Jihad." Even Ken Starr, who lead the impeachment team against former President Clinton, was outraged by her smears. But can we expect anything less from the daughter of Dick Cheney?

Finally, there is the indomitable Karl Rove in the second runner-up slot for boasting in Europe of his pride in the U.S. waterboarders and insisting that it was not torture - this, from a man who never wore a military uniform himself. Rove, who has been contradicted on so many occasions, is still an unhappy wanderer staggering to the darkness at the end of his tunnel.

Petraeus drops banana peel under Cheney's gospel

A WEEK or so has passed since Gen. Petraeus, once the revered Pericles of the Bush administration,  dropped a banana peel under the right-wing argument against closing Guantanamo while also criticizing our harsh interrogation methods on detainees.  

In case you missed it (it wasn't that big of a deal in the mainstream press) here are  precise quotes of his remarks  during a Fox News interview):

"Well, it's not for a soldier to say (where the detainees should be transferred to).  What I do support is what has been termed the responsible closure of Gitmo.  Gitmo has caused us problems, there's no question about it.  I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has been used by the enemy against us.  We have not been without missteps or mistakes in our activity since 9/11 and again Gitmo is a lingering reminder for the use of  some in that regard. "

And later in the interview regarding ending extreme interrogation - i.e., torture.

"Well, actually what I would ask is, does that not take away from our enemies a tool which again  have beaten  us around the head and shoulders in the court of public opinion?  When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions, we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it's important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international  justice arena and to practice those."

Violated the Geneva Conventions!  The very same conventions that Bush Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzalez dismissed  as "quaint"?  Alberto, you have a problem.  

 Except for the carnivores on the the right, who see the general flirting with  the edge of treason,  the response to Petraeus's comments has been strangely muted.  He has dashed the Dick- and- Liz Cheney show's rationale for harshly declaring that President Obama has made America "less safe."  To Obama, must we  now add  Petraeus to satisfy the carnivores?  For Cheney, who is trying save his skin by becoming a TV chatterbox as a bookend with his daughter, I think he would have been better off to quit while he was behind.  

 

The Goebbels Gang rants at Sotomayor

THESE HAVE BEEN  noisily frantic days for the Goebbels Gang in the Republican Party.  On cue, the gassier ones pounced on Sonia Sotomayor as an evil dragon lady created in President Obama's secret laboratory to fatally pollute their Gem of the Ocean.  For some reason, the attacks lacked spontaneity but rather suggested a well rehearsed twittered ambush  by the Gang's  generals and seasoned line officers who have performed so ignobly since the run-up to Obama's election.  (The Inquisition  even raised questions whether her Hispanic food tastes  might seriously affect her judicial decisions! You see where we are on this.)     

The effusive propaganda has been aimed directly at charming its captive audience, the Republican Base, a rather truculent minority that responds to right-wing hysterics with Pavlovian froth.  The trick is to keep the base fully mobilized to become a coherent force to recapture the GOP's "core values" with a third of the electorate. The inspiration may lie in a late poll of by a conservative website managed by  lobbyist Richard Viguerie, an influential Beltway  tax cut pest. The survey indicated that 91 pct. of the nation's conservatives believe that Obama belongs in one of four anti-American categories: Socialist, Marxist, Communist or Fascist.  Some of the dumber respondents will argue that he is all of the above. 

So you can see that the Goebbels Gang needs little encouragement to slander Sotomayor, of Puerto Rican descent,  as a stupid off-white woman   - this, from a party without a single African American in the House or Senate and an embarrassing one on the U.S. Supreme Court who reportedly hasn't asked a single question from his loft in three years.  

Before we reach again for the aspirin bottle,   let's tune in on Karl Rove, who was clearly not impressed with Sotomayor's superb academic distinction of Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton  who went on to preside over the Yale Law School Journal.  Rove needs a rest after he huffed:  "I know a lot of stupid people who went to Ivy League Schools."  In fairness, it was a busy day and he could be excused for overlooking his former boss. 

There's more.  "She's a bigot!  She's a racist," ranted Rush Limbaugh.  "She should be stopped,  She's a horrible pick!'"  Pat Buchanan, MSNBC's omnipresent Archie Bunker with a track record of demeaning immigrants, Jews and other minorities ,  impatiently  accused her of being  "not that intelligent".   Pat Robertson came out of mothballs  and  hastily concluded that Sotomayor "was the worst of them all."  Newt Gingrich flat out called her a racist - imagine that from a guy who cut his ideological teeth in Georgia.  Liz Cheney was quite disturbed that Sotomayor would make judicial decisions based on her "heart or empathy" adding, '"I think that's dangerous."

 

Whooa, there Liz.   Don't you remember that President George H.W. Bush, in nominating Clarence Thomas, described him as  a "delightful and warm, intelligent person who has great empathy and a wonderful sense of humor."

Empathy?  It's something the Goebbels Gang never had - and never will.