When asked over the weekend if Colin Powell should leave the Republican Party, as suggested by Rush Limbaugh, former Vice President Dick Cheney responded, "Well, if I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh, I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican."
While Dick Cheney is liable to say anything at any time, especially these days, when he’s seemingly more in the news than when he stalked the secret passages of the White House, there is something terribly wrong with this statement.
Remember, Dick Cheney got more deferments (5) from active military duty than anyone who has ever held the office of Vice President. To hear him dismiss a former colleague, a man who has served this country admirably, a man who attempted, in vain, to warn Dick and his cohorts of the terrible price to be paid for invading Iraq, well, it isn’t right.
Cheney threatens all who don’t conform to his way of thinking; suggesting President Obama’s stance on torture endangers our country. He says he’s got memos that prove the efficacy of drowning people, repeatedly, to within an inch of their lives, though we’ve not seen these memos. Perhaps these are only as credit-worthy as some of his earlier pronouncements, such as “we know they (the Iraqis) have biological and chemical weapons”, or “the evidence is overwhelming” that al-qaeda had been in high-level contact with Saddam Hussein; or his oft repeated assertion that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons program, or that the insurgency “is in its last throes”.
Cheney represents the ‘waterboarding’ wing of the Republican Party. All those in favor of thuggishness climb aboard. These United States cannot stand without adopting the methods of the very terrorists we hunt.
But wait. While Cheney’s alleged memos haven’t yet seen the light of day, many others have. Under intense scrutiny, these memos suggest that Cheney’s torture chambers were not set up to capture bad guys. Rather, Cheney took the gloves off to build a mountain of phony intelligence, to bolster the case for invading Iraq.
That the former Vice-President of the United States illegally tortured people in an attempt to elicit bogus intelligence, with which to justify an illegal invasion, then subsequently accuses President Obama of making Americans less safe, sort of makes you wonder what Bob Schieffer was thinking inviting Cheney onto his program.
Hey Bob, here’s a question you can throw at the former Vice President next time you two sit down to talk !*&!@, “Mr. Cheney, could your appearance and statements here today represent an attempt to escape charges of treason?"
