Semi-lucid war criminal Dick Cheney, while expressing solidarity with Obama after the drone strike that killed US citizen Anwar al Awlaki in Yemen, also insisted that Obama apologize for his speech in 2009 characterizing the Bush administration as a bunch of torturers, (I’m paraphrasing), claiming that the administration never tortured anyone and hadn’t flushed our traditional values down into a rancid cesspool with extraordinary rendition, water boarding and all of the other nefarious practices now seen by most clear thinking people as an overreach at best and disgusting and counterproductive foolishness at worst. Right, Dick. And Vlad the Impaler was just a misunderstood guy with anger management issues. Why anyone pays any attention to this ridiculous gasbag other than to prosecute him is a mystery to me, just as it is a mystery why someone like Chris Christie would want the garbled endorsement of Teutonic prince regent and notorious law-breaker Henry Kissinger, a man who to this day is deathly afraid to show his face anywhere in Asia for fear of being “Pinochet-ed” into a dank and stinking jail cell somewhere, never to be seen again.
Cheney’s flailing attempts to justify what are now widely held to have been illegal and unconstitutional actions emanating largely from his office are pathetic. When a “put up your dukes” warrior like John McCain calls you out and says flat out that it was torture you probably should just shred your passport, shut up and hope nobody comes knocking on your door with a warrant.
The variety of voices criticizing the Obama administration’s reliance on drones to play kill Waldo with the al Qaeda leadership should give him pause. It appears to be a low risk way to discourage them and the Taliban from getting together for fund raising car washes and bake sales but it is not ultimately making us safer and if the Pakistani security apparatus gets fed up enough with us pissing on their shoes to cook up another coup and install a more radical government we’d have more to worry about than who's living in what cave. The single scariest foreign policy issue today is the nukes in the basement of the Islamabad post office.
Apparently some genius inside the Justice Department wrote a John Yoo-inspired memo that purports to provide a legal justification for the assassination of US citizens abroad for saying the wrong things, without proof that they’ve done anything. This follows in the twisted tradition established by Cheney and his half-mad cabal of closeted Brown Shirts serving the clown prince, Bush the Younger. So Obama thinks he has license to go to any length necessary to take the fight to al Qaeda and the Taliban bastards who won’t stand still long enough so he can throw a straight right hand. We’ll chase the tattered rabble right into the town square of some godforsaken stucco compound and use a Predator drone to blow it all up if it means we can take out some ersatz Tokyo Rose in a dish-dash.
After the candidate Obama used the perfidy and avarice of the whole Bush criminal enterprise to get elected, he decides that using a gun in a knife fight is a pretty good idea, if for no other reason than the entire ridiculous Afghan adventure has no foreseeable end game and therefore he has no reasonable option other than to say screw it, just take some people out and hope for the best. Unfortunately this lends credence to the past high crimes and misdemeanors of Cheney and his half-baked band of reactionaries and makes Obama and this administration no better, a truly tragic outcome and maybe the perfect metaphor for the whole stupid adventure of the last ten years.
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