The former vice president is just taking a cheap shot here that aids his overall goal: Delegitimizing this president, and he's been doing it from day one. Cheney has emerged as the leader of the Republican Party, and some of his recent obnoxiousness seems at least partly directed at his old boss, President Bush, who by contrast has acted the way former U.S. chief executives traditionally do: Keeping quiet and respectful. Cheney's still angry that Bush wouldn't pardon his buddy Scooter Libby and that he began to put some limits on torture and interrogation. So he's aiming at two presidents with his belligerence.
But I wonder where it stops. Clearly Cheney's aiming to take over the Republican party and bring about a neocon restoration. I'm blown away by the immediate disrespect and political posturing by people like Cheney, Sen. Jim DeMint and Rep. Pete Hoekstra have shown the president at a time of real threat. (Oh, and Pete Hoekstra: I think raising money to fight the "Obama/Pelosi" approach to national security by running for Michigan governor is a little backwards; you have a tiny bit more influence on such issues on the House Intelligence Committee.) Way to aid the terrorists, guys: Undermine the president as a naïve weakling unready to fight. I think the kneejerk partisan savaging of Obama is un-American, it's what Republicans would have called traitorous had anyone tried criticizing Bush this way any time after 9/11 (actually, you were called a traitor for challenging the Iraq war in 2003). (Joan Walsh, “Let’s get Dick Cheny on facebook!” Salon, 31 Dec. 2009)
I prefer it when you don't allow him into your mind
Boy I like you and Chris. Such good people. And you just feel the level of sadism on the right, and the exasperating self-delusion. But you can also feel how dealing with huge unfortunates like this can really lure "you" to do such things as make the war, once again, in essence, Bush's mess, and so far away from considering that it might just be the way the Obama administration wants things too. The concern for those of us who believe Obama is not just a good man who's doing his damndest in hugely trying situations, but someone who will be abandoning -- who would abandon, even without opposition from a largely insane right --many of the people the left has for so long been trying to empower and protect, is that the need to put these guys in their place is so alluring, so, alright, this has gone on long enough!, that we're kinda going to lose you for awhile. I mean both you and Chris. If you have to deal with them, deal with them. Please consider, though, that it is possible to see people like this, and actually think mental illness, and therefore not be so much drawn to want to crush them. It is true that Obama has been under attack from day one, and the unreasonableness of this, the unAmericanness of this sort of behavior, toward the people's choice -- their hope, their extension into the future --makes fully emotioned attacks against them a sign of one's clear headedness, because its degree of unreasonableness is such that it should not be bearable to any at all the least bit sane, but I suspect that also true is that they may agitate some significant putuponness that you've known a long, long while, that still draws your return fire -- your, no, I will not let you do that to me! -- and can carry you away.
Obama is the perfect aesthetic to make continued war sacrifice, possible. The relief at his measuredness can so readily allow corporate appeasement, to become the only thing to be done. This kind of thing can just go on and on and on. Some of us can see 8 years on, a largely expanded war (with, quite possibly, some talk of the draft), students, young people, largely ignored -- if not now the newly suspicious -- and an increasingly expanding lower class (with many now being shaped to seem responsible for their fate, if not actually in truth most responsible for the ills of all Americans) -- and also a left exasperatingly still so readily drawn to talk of Cheney et al.'s latest disregard. Scares me. We're afraid we won't be seen, by people who could protect us. And we are a left that will do immense good, if we can make it on through.
Link: Let’s get Dick Cheney on facebook! (Salon)
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