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Editorial-
Radical Revealed
In His Own Words
"We didn't get elected
to be popular. We didn't get elected to worry just about the fate of the
Republican Party. Our mission is to do everything we can to prevail on what is
now, we believe, a global conflict, a fundamental test of the character of the
American people, whether or not we're going to be able to prevail against one of
the most evil opponents we've ever faced. And on our watch, we're going to do
absolutely everything we can to see to it that we do succeed and that we do
prevail in that conflict, and sometimes that means that we don't do well in the
polls or people want to be critical. That's their prerogative. But we sit there
every morning and read the intelligence reports in the Oval Office and we know
what's happening out there. We know how committed our adversaries are to try to
get at us. And we've done what we thought was right for the country."
These are the words of Vice President Dick Cheney in early May of this year
during an interview by Bret Bair shown on Fox News’ Special Report with Bret
Hume.
At first, and on face value, the words
uttered by Dick Cheney have an above the political fray, honor at all cost ring
to them, until they are examined more closely and it is recalled that this vice
president has been instrumental in utilizing the pre-emptive war in Iraq to
boost GOP popularity and strength whenever needed over the past half dozen
years. It is only now that such a strategy is no longer useful, since so many of
the pronouncements of Mr. Cheney and his partner, George W. Bush, have been
proven hollow if not out and out false.
Mr. Cheney, together with
Mr. Bush, have initiated and overseen policies that have essentially turned the
federal government into an instrument of a radicalized Republican Party. This
has been done in a calculatedly divisive manner in which everyone not in
specific and complete agreement with these two men is painted as either
weak-kneed or soft on terrorism or even unpatriotic, if not actually traitorous.
Mr. bush and Mr. Cheney have
elevated a subtle type of McCarthyism to levels that even the infamous
Republican Senator Joe McCarthy himself never attained, even though he was the
instigator of the Congressional witch-hunt's of the early 1950's and progenitor
of the blacklists that destroyed many careers and lives without the need of ever
providing the accused with a trial, thereby giving his surname to one of the
darkest periods in American history.
Even ‘Tail-gunner
Joe’ could hardly have dreamed of or hoped to attain such a weakening of
Constitutional safeguards - those pillars of law created by the Founding Fathers
to protect all Americans from an overzealous and overreaching government - than
what has been attained by the Bush/Cheney administration and its Congressional
allies through the so-called Patriot Act, and other direct executive branch
edicts.
Americans are spied upon, phones are
tapped, all while a frontal assault on common freedoms and civil liberties is conducted. Simultaneously
the Cheney/Bush team and their radical GOP allies have thrown overboard the Geneva Convention guidelines for warfare, put in
place by Americans after WWII to try to assure that the torture and other
atrocities committed by the Japanese and Germans against Allied troops would
never again happen. Now Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush have stepped on and over the
hard-won principles of the Geneva Convention and instigated the torture of
prisoners, while at the same time they've disregarded the concept of habeas corpus, a
legal linchpin in any democratic society.
And of course the
Cheney/Bush administration has undertaken 'pre-emptive war' as a matter of
U.S. policy, even though the concept has long been discredited and shunned by
Americans of all political parties. Where now is the proud claim that Americans
don't start wars, but do finish them?
Dick Cheney and George Bush have sought to
undermine the common public interest in every realm, from world-stage arrogance
that weakens the nation's security along with its international prestige, to
attempts at home to allow
logging, mineral and oil drilling rights on heretofore protected national
forests and other public lands to strangling the budget of the national park
service and other agencies that serve the average American. Perhaps worst of
all, they have gamed the extreme religious right while advancing the interests
of the giant pharmaceutical companies, thereby narrowing avenues of medical
research.
They have put in place policies that fly in
the face of true public interest in virtually every nook and cranny where
government authority has sway. And virtually all of these actions have served to
help large corporate special interests.
Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush, as is well known
now, strove mightily to turn the judiciary into an ideologically driven force
available to uphold a reactionary value system, a value system that masquerades
as conservatism but is in truth radical and intended to serve a one-class
society; the very rich and no one else.
To that end they have corrupted the U.S.
Attorney General’s office and have sought to control the federal court system
and the U.S. Congress. In the process they have exploited the nation’s military
and at the same time turned most of world opinion against America, therefore
leaving U.S. soldiers almost alone on the Cheney/Bush battlefields, save for the
questionable company of so-called defense contractors and their private armies.
Where is the oversight of Halliburton and Bechtel Parsons, et al?
And what about oil? Everyone seems to have
forgotten that it was after the all-powerful Vice President Cheney held
super-secret White House meetings with the top executives of the oil and energy
industry that suddenly gasoline, fuel oil and natural gas prices began to rise.
Mr. Cheney still refuses to divulge any information, to the U.S. Congress or
anyone else, regarding those ‘Energy Summit’ meetings.
Now, as the public becomes increasingly
aware of just what has been happening, the house of cards is tottering, and Mr.
Cheney tries desperately to wrap himself in a cloak of honor. He asserts he and
Mr. Bush “didn’t get elected to be popular..."
He seeks to make Americans believe that his
was a higher goal, and again reaches down deep for that proverbial final refuge
of the scoundrel, patriotism. His actions and that of his partner, Mr. Bush, are
all about winning a global contest with evil, he says, therefore by implication
everything is justifiable. He tries to appear as a great if not holy warrior
standing on the precipice bravely facing approaching Armageddon.
But recorded history has long proven the
fallacy of such political posturing and quasi-religious paranoia, especially
when it is built upon secrecy. Mr. Cheney asserts that he and his partner, Mr.
Bush, "sit there every morning and read the intelligence reports in the Oval
Office and we know what's happening out there. We know how committed our
adversaries are to try to get at us..." Of course no one else will judge the
merits of the threats because the information is secret; we must just trust Mr.
Cheney and Mr. Bush even when they declare its necessary to destroy the
Constitutional safeguards of this free society in order to protect it from
people who want to destroy the nation's freedom. A very elliptical argument; the
end justifies the means even though the result may be the same as if the enemy
were victorious, except that those left at the top of the system wouldn't be
foreign.
Turning a free republic operating on
democratic principles toward a modern version of a fascist state, in order to
protect it against totalitarian assault, is truly passing through the looking
glass, darkly. Stoking fear while calling oneself a patriot is in fact cowardly;
Mr. Cheney has wallowed in fear mongering, as has his partner, Mr. Bush.
Mr. Cheney has revealed himself in
countless ways as a reprehensible radical, and the fact that he now disavows any
concern for the traditional Republican Party is the final proof. He declares “we
didn’t get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party.” This,
for once, is candor.
As The Bradley Report stated long ago, this
administration is not representative of the historic Republican Party; this
administration embodies a radical agenda that it cloaks by calling itself
conservative; some of its radical adherents like to call themselves neo-cons,
but they’re all the same thing: radicals. There is nothing conservative about
the Cheney/Bush Administration, and that is why Dick Cheney, for once, told the
truth when he indicated little concern for the GOP as a whole.
It should be a true wake up call for the
vast majority of Republicans, who are in fact patriotic Americans, that they
have been taken in by the worst kind of charlatans, men like Dick Cheney, George
W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Paul Wolfowitz and a substantial list of others who have
filled various national offices calling themselves part of the GOP, especially
in the past fifteen years.
MB
July, 2007
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