The Man in the Iron Bubble

Maybe if we all take up a collection, we can raise enough money to bribe Dick Cheney to just go away. He may be the most politically tone deaf politician in recent history, acting as if everyone agrees that the Bush administration's policies have been dazzling in their genius. You wonder if Dick actually checks any news sources or if he just relies on a circle of fawning sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear. If Bush was the boy in the bubble, Cheney's may be the model that bubble was based on.

Or maybe "bubble" is the wrong word. More like "armored iron sphere." Not only doesn't truth seem to reach Dick, but it seems to be actively repelled. Nothing sinks in, because no truth ever gets close enough to touch him. There's a certain segment of the population who seem to believe that you can force your beliefs to become fact. All it takes is a sincere and fervent faith that your view of the universe is correct and it magically becomes true, true, true. You see it with creationists, Holocaust-deniers, global warming naysayers, free market moonies, and other various and assorted species of flatearthers. No fact can get in, because facts are the enemy of faith. Every bit of evidence that your position is wrong -- no matter how damning or conclusive -- is rejected immediately. The logic of this illogical thinking is simple; you're right, therefore, any evidence to the contrary must be wrong. That's all the proof you need to keep believing that the Earth is in the thrall of UFO overlords or that Vladimir Putin is really a robot or that Dick Cheney is right.

Of course, it may just be that the former-VP is just slinging propaganda when he pretends to be as ignorant and stupid as he often seems to be. It may just be that Dick's familiar with reality, but uses lies and fearmongering to try to change our perception of it. It may just be that he's not wrapped in a cocoon of yes men.

But, as always when we're talking about neocons, I'll go ahead and take them at their word on what they believe and don't believe. I'll assume that Dick Cheney's not a lying sack, but just a stupid and ignorant man. Honestly, you can't be generous with these people -- it's completely impossible. Your choices are always "they're lying" or "they're stupid." Somewhere along the line, we've established that it's a terrible, terrible thing to call these guys liars, so we're left with stupid. And that's being charitable.

While it's both fun and easy to throw rocks at Dick like this, I do have a reason to revisit the bad old days of a couple of weeks ago, when Dick Cheney and his sidekick (some guy named Bob Shrub or Jimmie Tree or Lennie Asparagus... something like that) worked in the White House, desperately trying to rewrite history in their favor. It was called the "Legacy Project" and the idea was to make a last, Hail-Mary attempt to rehab the neoconservative image after eight long years of nearly uninterrupted disaster.

But there's no reason that the attempt has to stop after the Bush administration (that's the name! Bush) left the White House. As former administration officials, they can still get a reporter or two to come a'runnin' whenever they feel the need drop some whoppers and try to get everyone to wet their pants just one more time.

In this case, it was three reporters; Mike Allen, Jim Vanderhei, and John Harris of Politico. I guess dealing with the sheer volume of horse crap here is a big job that takes many hands.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

That's right, one more pitch for torture. I won't say "one last pitch," because I'm sure it's not. If Dick's as much of a psycho- or sociopath as he seems to be, I'd imagine that it's hard to get him to shut the hell up about torture. I so don't want to know what sites the bookmarks on his laptop link to.

I could go through and point out the problems with Dick's view, but that'd just mean rewriting older posts. Suffice it to say that Dick only knows one song -- "WE'RE ALL GOING TO FREAKIN' DIE!!!" We all know how it goes, it's been stuck in our heads for the last eight years. Dick can come up with nothing new, despite the fact that the mojo wore off this particular spell a long time ago. We're tired of being terrified. It's probably time to give courage a spin.

But Dick's in his iron bubble and it doesn't make any difference whether the bubble is real or he's just pretending it is. Either way, he can't stop behaving as if we're all on the same page, 100% behind the path the mastermind Bush administration laid out for us.

It's almost sad, really. This tired, sick old mental patient babbling away as if anything he said made any sense and as if every word hadn't worn out its welcome a long, long time ago. Like a lunatic on street corner, Dick yells out "The end is near!" to anyone who comes within shouting distance.

Maybe it's time everyone started avoiding that street.

-Wisco