Go Fuck Yourself, Dick Cheney

     It's difficult, if not outright impossible, to remain respectful when a vilified public figure dies. One has to balance their war crimes and other villainies with respect to the grieving family. One feels that tug trying to lead them to the high road and we can either follow that tug or just resist it.

     In the countless pages of this blog, I'd rightly called out Dick Cheney, who died today, as the war criminal and psychopath he truly was. Just because a villain is dead, it doesn't make him retroactively immune from criticism. I didn't do it when Charlie Kirk was killed nearly two months ago and I'm not about to engage in hypocrisy now.

     Besides, it's not as if right wingers show any restraint when a Democrat dies.

     And Dick Cheney has oceans of blood on his dead hands for his part in Iran Contra and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, seemingly like all recently-dead statesmen, Cheney will receive a state funeral. His obituaries (thinly-veiled hagiographies) are already bleaching out his war crimes, unable to describe him as anything more or less than "controversial" or "the most powerful vice president in modern times".

     But, as Mehdi Hassan recently wrote, Cheney should have died at the Hague. Dick Cheney was one of those Republican figures, and the Republican Party always seems to have them in great abundance, who furtively hid in the shadows and inflicted untold amounts of human death and suffering while successfully masquerading their crimes and villainies as "patriotism".

     Dick Cheney may have been a patriot but only in a warped sense. With Donald Rumsfeld in his first turn as Defense Secretary and Cheney as Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff, both men actively worked against Ford and cost him his presidency because they felt that Ford wasn't sufficiently conservative enough.

     From his role in Iran Contra in the late 80s to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, one can credibly draw a line between Cheney and over a million deaths on several continents. Cheney achieved his greatest power when the feeble-minded George W. Bush asked him to head a commission that would choose his running mate.

     Cheney dithered for a bit before naming himself, to which the idiot boy from Texas readily agreed. For the next eight years, Cheney operated as a shadow president, literally dictating policy while Bush stumbled around the Beltway choking on pretzels. When 9/11 happened, Cheney showed what a true Republican profile in courage he was by fleeing to the White House bunker while Bush was flown around on Air Force One like a lost piece of luggage.

     A little over six months later, we invaded Iraq and, before that, Afghanistan, for their fictional involvement in 9/11. Cheney implemented his "1% Doctrine", stating that if there was even a 1% chance that a rogue state could launch terrorist attacks on the US, then we must take the offensive and attack them first.

     As well as falsely accusing Iraq and Afghanistan of involvement in 9/11, Cheney also spearheaded a conspiracy theory about Iraq's equally fictitious weapons of mass destruction. And throughout the Bush administration's nearly six year-long involvement in Iraq, the government funneled tens of billions in cost plus, no-bid contracts to war profiteer Halliburton, Cheney's "former" company.

     As a result of this noxious pack of lies, over one million innocent Iraqi civilians died as we inflicted on them the psychopaths from our own military as well as the war criminals from Blackwater and others. And while blood was pooling in the streets of Baghdad, former Sen. Patrick Leahy questioned Cheney about Halliburton and Cheney grumbled. "Go fuck yourself."

     In his last public statement last year, Cheney united with his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, to urge people not to vote for Donald Trump. It wasn't because Cheney saw the light and found his inner liberal. True evil normally reacts in a hostile manner to evil even greater than it.

     Dick Cheney's only been dead for a few hours and I can perfectly imagine him already having displaced Satan from his throne and running the underworld from the 9th Circle.