Cheney’s Revisionist History: No Sex or Videotape, But Endless, Endless Lies

Let’s all forget about the “little guys” that ex-Veep Dick Cheney claims he is trying to protect from the vengeful partisans in the Obama Justice Department. This is all about covering his own posterior, and posterity. “Only following orders” is – post-Nurenberg- not an excuse for the deliberate crafting by Bush administration toadies of policy memoranda that tortuously rationalized torture. The real outrage here is the deliberate and cynical actions of the Bush administration to fabricate/falsify “evidence” to justify the invasion of Iraq, duping Congress and American public into an unnecessary war. The sole purpose of that ill-conceived invasion was to impart John Wayne/Macho Man street cred to a weak and cowardly President in the wake of 9/11. Cheney and Rumsfeld were dead certain that the Iraq adventure would be a cakewalk, and that George W. Bush would get to strut like a hero in front of an admiring world. The lives of 5000 American soldiers and, by now, several Trillion dollars, have been squandered in that debacle, one that historians will surely describe as the most egregious – and criminal – blunder by any administration in the history of the US. John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury et al are mere chumps in the bet-the-country game played by Bush, Cheney, Rummy and their sycophantic mouthpieces in the media. These are the guys I want to see frog-marched down Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to the stocks on the Mall.