Arrest Cheney and Haul His Sorry Carcass to The Hague!

by Pa Rock
Public Citizen

Dick Cheney needs to crawl off into a hole and pull the hole in after him. One would assume that after eight years of systematically dismantling the Constitution of the United States and shaming his country as no other Vice-President has since the days of Aaron Burr, The Dick would have the decency to just shut up and go away. But one would be wrong.

This morning as I was getting ready to go paint, I had the CBS news program, Face the Nation, playing for background noise. Cheney was the guest, and he was in full attack mode.

The former Vice-President is very pissed that President Obama released the torture memos and shined a light on the crimes of the previous administration. Cheney is going at it hammer-and-tong trying to rewrite, or at least justify, the history of his glory days. He has very good reason to be in attack mode: he doesn't want to be the subject of civil suits that could put a dent in all of those Halliburton millions that he piled up while he was supposed to be serving America - and he doesn't want to go to prison - even one of the country club prisons frequented by Republicans and the business classes.

I used to agree with President Obama that nothing would be accomplished by dredging up the past and trying to punish the Bush administration officials for their stupid, dangerous, and treasonous acts. But that was then and his is now. If The Dick is insistent on flaunting himself in front of every available camera and microphone and bloviating about how much safer he made America, then I say let Congress, and the Courts, and the Spanish judges, and The Hague have him - and let the cow chips fall where they may!

America doesn't owe Dick Cheney squat, but he owes us for destroying our national pride and our reputation for fairness and honesty. Cheney and his minions managed to decrease our national integrity to a level comparable to that of North Korea in just eight short years. The Dick owes us for the deaths of over four thousand of our finest young people (and the senseless mangling of countless thousands of others) in a futile and needless war - while letting our true enemy, Osama bin Laden, a relative of Bush and Cheney's Saudi oil buddies, get away. He owes us every corrupt dollar that was funneled to Halliburton, Blackwater, and Kellogg, Brown, and Root for those scurrilous no-bid contracts. And lest we forget the thousands of dead and mutilated Iraqi children, their blood is on his hands as well. All of those bills need to be paid.

But, the former Vice President did not really come up with anything new or newsworthy until near the end of the interview when Bob Schieffer asked him about the leadership of the Republican Party, and, in particular, should the party be looking for leadership from a moderate like Colin Powell or a firebrand like Rush Limbaugh. Cheney took the bait and ran with it.

Cheney said, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh." He then went off on a mean little tirade about the renegade Powell supporting Barack Obama over McCain in the November election.

Translation: Colin Powell was a good nigra back when he was steppin' and fetchin' and carrying water for the Bush team - telling their lies to the United Nations with a straight face, but now that he has developed a spine - well...the Republican party doesn't need any nigras that have the ability to stand tall. Rush Limbaugh is a more representative face of the Grand Old Party.

How sad is that?