Their Hypocrisy, Again

A wee update, because Dick Cheney, at least in the eyes of the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin, is the administration's "biggest attack dog"--not to mention the speculation that he is also Bob Woodward's source on Vallery Plame (rejected in today's Wall Street Journal). I think calling Cheney any kind of dog is an insult to dogs, but granting the metaphor, I'll say that he most closely resembles the fell war dogs the Spanish unleashed on Native Americans during the Conquest. Those creatures attacked, killed, and maimed men, women, and children. There are even reports of Spaniards feeding captives to their dogs. The legacy of that abuse lingered for generations and affected the non-use and use of dogs in the American military, as I show--not to be self-promoting--in A Dog's History of America.

Now, back to Cheney's attack, from November 17. The Bushbuckers are at it again with Bushy and Dickie double-teaming the Democrats criticizing their abuse of intelligence prior to invading Iraq, as if Republicans weren't doing the same. Cheney, the man with the different agenda, who couldn't be bothered to protest the Vietnam War or fight in Vietnam, or do anything but serve Dick Cheney's lust for power, declared the charges, reports the Washington Post and virtually every other media source, "reprehensible." Bold talk from a man who can't reveal why he wanted to go to war or the names of the people who helped design his energy policy or what he and the Hypocrite in Chief really knew about planned terrorist attacks prior to 9/11--and typically twisted in logic. What's reprehensible are wars of aggression. What's reprehensible is torture. What's reprehensible is fearmongering. What's reprehensible is lying about your reasons for war. What's reprehensible is repeatedly putting the same troops in harm's way because you know your war is so unpopular that were you to implement a draft, you would face a popular uprising on your own shores; what's reprehensible is designing communities to waste energy.

And while I'm lodging my protest, let me ask what is democratic about an election in which people vote not for individual candidates but for slates or one in which huge percentages vote to approve a constitution they have never read, simply because their imam tells them to?