Usually I make myself read something before I comment on it. I couldn’t make myself read the Cheney piece in the Wall Street Journal. Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, criticize President Obama for his actions, his judgment, his decisions, and his inaction in Iraq. They say, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.” This is like Lucifer complaining it’s too hot in hell. You have to ask why the Wall Street Journal gives the former vice-president and his daughter a whole half page in its op-ed section to blame other people for a disaster Richard Cheney helped to bring about.
Richard Cheney is a war criminal. I don’t say that to stoke up the fires that burn all the time between the Republican and Democratic batttle lines. I say it because he sponsored a war that, eleven years later, most people recognize as illegal. He even persuaded Colin Powell, a man of integrity, to present evidence for war that he knew would be dismissed if he himself presented it. He probably appealed to Powell’s patriotism. Cheney is a man of such limited moral vision, a man so degraded in his heart, that he cannot possibly know the harm he has done. He has no humility, and will always believe he is right.
Around the time Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat from Minnesota, took a stand against the war in Iraq, in the fall of 2002, Vice-President Cheney personally summoned Wellstone to his office. Ostensibly to talk with him about his vote on the war, Cheney wanted to keep Wellstone quiet because the senator had expressed skepticism about the 9/11 story: you know, the story about nineteen Saudis with box cutters, how they leveled three skyscrapers in lower Manhattan with two airplanes. According to Wellstone, Cheney told him, “If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.”
Days later, on October 25, 2002, Wellstone and his family were dead, victims of a plane crash investigators couldn’t explain. When Cheney threatens you, he means it.
To return to Cheney’s criticism of Obama: the former vice-president may have no second thoughts about his disastrous tenure in office, and the Journal may lend him a platform to bring his successors down, but history’s judgment of his actions while in office will not be kind. Like powerful, unprincipled and reckless kings of old who fomented war, only to bring misery, death and defeat to their own people, future generations will recognize the nature of this man. Rarely has one bad individual caused so much trouble, or caused such extensive ruin.
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