Cheney Vents
Read Time:6 Minute, 52 Second
Cheney is right: everyone else is wrong
Promoting his new book, Cheney rises from the shadows of his secret compound
Cheney is back with impotent vengeance. His new book, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir reads like a tome penned by, perhaps, a sociopath. A touch of psychosis may inform the book. The illness is characterized by a loss of contact with reality and false beliefs borderlining on truth. Draw your own conclusions. Oh, and by the way, he believes torture works. His book echoes Ahab’s rant from Melville’s Moby Dick”
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea and burned Atlanta to the ground. As Maureen Dowd notes we should not be surprised: Scorched earth runs in the family. Napoleon in exile wrote a similarly delusional autobiography.
The former vice president unapologetically maintains all his executive decisions actions were entirely appropriate. He does not apologize for his role in torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions. Cheney instead targets members of the administration under which he served. The impotent, deposed emperor can’t get his clothes back. He’s taking his ire out on any available target.
Cheney unwittingly portrays himself as a Gollum-like creature huddling over the power he currently wields—none. His self-aggrandizement is beyond rational comprehension.
A POLITCO article notes, It was Socrates who said the unexamined life is not worth living, and while an autobiography is certainly a form of self-examination, it appears Cheney has given himself an A-plus. Confidence in oneself is an important trait, especially in a leader. But if that leader finds absolutely no fault, how is that not hubris?
He has no regrets about his support of torturing prisoners of war and Abu-Ghraib. From POLITICO:
Cheney acknowledged the administration underestimated the challenges in Iraq, but blamed the violence on the terrorists. He also defends tough interrogations,, or water boarding, stating these practices extracted information that saved lives. He rejects these techniques as “torture.” He also criticizes Obama’s decision to withdraw the 33,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan in 2009 by September 2012, but writes he is happy to note that Obama did not close Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
In discussing the much-disputed “16 words” about Iraq’s supposed hunt for uranium in Niger that were included in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address to help justify the eventual invasion, Cheney said that unlike other aides, he saw no need to apologize for making that claim.
Of the president’s 2003 State of the Union address to justify America’s eventual invasion of Iraq, Cheney said he had no reason to apologize. He condescendingly refers to Secretary Rice, who he writes was originally opposed to the invasion. She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk and tearfully admitted I had been right. According to Cheney, he served as the lynchpin in Rice’s change of mind.
Cheney wrote that he urged President Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007 and punish Iran. Bush opted for diplomacy, still outraged about the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The ex-vice president bafflingly rationalizes his judgment. I… made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor, but I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, “Does anyone here agree with the vice president?” Not a single hand went up around the room. He was right, of course. Everyone else was wrong.
Cheney seems to believe he was the bulwark between America and the rest of the world. But most America loathed and ridiculed him at every opportunity. In My Time presents reflections of a delusional person blissfully welcoming the immense hatred directed towards him. He seems to relish much of the criticism heaped on him by liberals and progressives.
The ex-VP wrote that he offered to resign several times when Bush prepared for his re-election in 2004. He wrote that he feared he might be a burden to the GOP. According to Cheney, Bush said he wanted him to stay.
Cheney declared on CBS on Sunday, that autobiography’s shocking revelations would have heads exploding all over Washington.
Not so, according to Former Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He retorted that his head is perfectly fine. My head isn’t exploding, I haven’t noticed any other heads exploding in Washington, D.C. From what I’ve read in the newspapers and seen on television it’s essentially a rehash of events of seven or eight years ago,” he said in a Face the Nation appearance.
Powell continued,
That’s quite a visual. [It’s] the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist or the kind of headline you might see one of the super market tabloids write. It’s not the kind of headline I would have expected to come from one of the vice presidents of the United States of America.
I think Dick overshot the runway. Mr. Cheney is free to say what he wishes, but so far I haven’t seen anything in it that is as explosive as he claims it is, and I don’t see any heads laying on the street.
Cheney and Powell disagreed numerous times while they served the Bush administration, particularly over events leading to the 2003 Iraq invasion by American forces. Powell said Cheney’s description that how Powell went outside with his criticism of administration policies is nonsense.
The former Secretary of State also implied that Cheney wrongly took credit for Powell’s resignation in 2004. Powell said he always planned to serve only four years. He labeled as almost condescending Cheney’s criticism about Condoleezza Rice, who succeeded Powell.
Powell’s animus towards Cheney runs deep. In a Face the Nation interview in 2009, he expressed cutting, civil disdain for Cheney. Powell stated Republicans Cheney, Limbaugh, and those with similar goals could marginalize the party by leaning too far right.
Powell said the GOP should strive to become more inclusive by reaching out to independents and moderates:
If we don’t reach out more, the party is going to be sitting on a very, very narrow base,” Powell warned. “You can only do two things with a base. You can sit on it and watch the world go by, or you can build on the base. What we have to do is debate and define who we are and what we are and not just listen to diktats that come down from the right wing of the party.
Cheney wrote that after his heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During this time, he recounts a vivid dream that he lived in an Italian villa. It was in the countryside, a little north of Rome, and it really seemed I was there. I can still describe the villa where I passed the time, the little stone paths I walked to get coffee or a batch of newspapers.
As Maureen Dowd quipped: Caesar and his cappuccino.
Cheney wrote in his epilogue I have some medical choices to make in the future, but I’m doing well for now… I have some fishing planned… I have reached the biblical three score and ten, and a man who can look back on the things I have seen and the people I have known has no grounds for complaint.
He is oblivious that he committed many crimes which can only be described as unspeakably sadistic—and perhaps treasonous. He believes all his actions justified. In My Time confirms about Dick Cheney what most of us already knew.
MMA thanks our sources: Wendy Addams, Marueen Dowd and Charlie Savage at the New York Times, The New York Daily News, and POLITICO.
When do you plan to read the new Cheney book?
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Perhaps when he is actually in Hell and spitting, I’ll look at his tale. Atheists notwithstanding, were the man in question actually spitting-or spitted-in Hell, would anyone be surprised?
Bradley, have you read Perelandra? I posted this note on my FB page today.
Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him-a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation.
C.S. Lewis, “Perelandra”
Um, Dorothy, I’m a construction laborer. The only C.S. Lewis book I’ve ever read is ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.’ I’ve read the paragraph you posted above three times already, and I think I’ve got the concept, but I’ll read it again to make sure
Bradley, Perelandra is part of Lewis’ space trilogy: Out of that Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. They are truly wonderful books.
Lewis’ comment means that a person who can do nothing but hate ends up self-destructing. The comment is out of context, but the gist is ages ago Cheney was a person, now the ruins of what he once was is now just impotent rage.
I wish I could understand construction: it’s far more useful than being a geek.
🙂
It’s really too bad that while he was unconscious for weeks, someone never pulled the plug on this sorry bastard. That’s the nicest thing I can say about him, since I’m saving my good venom for when his mechanical heart gives out, taking him off the face of the earth.
I plan on doing what I always do with these war mongerer’s books when they release, ignoring them. Little Lizard apparently helped him write this piece of worship, she is just as bad as her father imo.
Right again, Jess. Little Lizard helped. But, why insult lizards?
When do I plan to read the Cheney book? I haven’t read fiction for years, I find faction a lot more interesting, but if I ever go back to reading fantasy, his book would be at the bottom of the list.
At this stage in my life I am not a real big reader of grandiose fiction so my best guess is, never. Dick Cheney is every kind of person I never wanted to be. He is a mean, angry, spiteful old man, well, I can’t help the old part. Your comment that he is a sociopath might be correct but I think I might characterize him as a psychopath. I truly believe that Cheney would do anything for his own self interest regardless of who it hurt, including himself. His maniacal ravings and his beliefs in his own infallibility have made him a legend in his own mind and a mental case in the minds of others. When he dies I swear I will send him a bouquet of loco weed.
Again, we are on the same page, lazer.
A person called a “psychopath” or “sociopath” is a person whose behavior is largely amoral and asocial and who is characterized by irresponsibility, lack of remorse or shame, perverse or impulsive (often criminal) behavior, and other serious personality defects, generally without psychotic attacks or symptoms.
That this man was only a manufactured heartbeat away from the president’s office is horrifically chilling. Others shared the Gollum analogy. Fiction aside, I hope you enjoy the view:
http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/66000/Dick-Cheney-as-Gollum–66298.jpg
I’d read the book if I thought there was anything in there that I didn’t already know. Probably the same with most of us.
Although generically synonymous, “sociopath” and “psychopath” have somewhat different implications that reflect the varying clinical interpretations of two separate schools of thought.
Sociologists and social psychologists tend to use the term “sociopath,” focusing on maladaptive behavior whereby a person preys on other members of society.
“Psychopath” is a bit more sinister insofar as it implies an organic pathology within the brain (e.g., the amygdala) of the person in question. Some psychiatrists and criminal psychologists prefer the latter term.
However one decides to refer to this machiavellian cyborg, my personal grievance arises from the number of people who will never reach “the biblical three score and ten” thanks to his actions.
A point of contention between many of my friends in the mental health industry is the sociopath vs the psychopath, both of which are incurable and both of which fit the man of the moment. A sociopath is one who who has a conscious but chooses not to use it. He is intentionally an evil person, The psychopath does not have a conscious and is simply and evil person. In the either case the outcome is the same, They enjoy demeaning and torturing others and life other than their own means nothing to them. This description fits pretty well with both Cheney and Osama Bin Laden.
Thanks, lazersedge. I thought the two terms were synonyms. Given all dick’s self-aggrandizement, that he has any consciousness of his own pathology seems likely. I never realized the similarities between Cheney and bin-Laden. You’re right: they are mirror images of each other.