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It Is Not a 'Post-9/11 World,' Dick - It Is a Post YOU World

Dick Cheney loves to go on the Sunday talk shows and grumble about how Democrats are blind to the hard realities of the "post 9/11 world." Dare to question The World According to Cheney, and you’re branded a traitor, an enemy and – worst of all, you get slapped with the mother of all zingers: "you’re stuck in pre-9/11 reality." Just what we need: lectures on reality from the criminally insane.

There’s a transcendental thing that happens when Cheney tilts that asymmetrical bionic mega-bypass head of his and emits words that make you question momentarily whether even language itself might be a hopelessly corrupted instrument of malevolence. All you can do is gape as The Head proceeds to project that inimitable "Not only are we going to pretend now that I am not the most incompetent lying thieving genocidal freak on the face of the earth—I’m actually a brilliant all-knowing protector" demeanor. At that moment, one can only pinch one’s self or just drift off into placid thoughts of a Kool-Aid party. Is Tim Russert really nodding in awe-struck deference to this maniac? Are we living in a Marvel comic, and if so, where the hell is Spidey when we need him? Am I hanging upside down from the ceiling? Have I died and gone to hell?

Cheney, of course, is one of those rare individuals (rare, this side of Osama Bin Laden) for whom 9/11 was a purely wonderful event. Being a war profiteer, for him, post-9/11 reality has been the best thing since a sliced atom. Barely a year before the cataclysmic tragedy, Cheney was the C.E.O. of a company that was well on its way to bankruptcy and ruin. "Peace on Earth" makes for a nice Christmas card, but for a very dismal bottom line if you are in the war business. Within a year of Cheney’s job change, however, the fortunes of his rotting corporation skyrocketed. The moribund Halliburton was transformed, almost overnight, into a money factory. All it took was, well, a war, "a long slog," in Rumsfeld’s vernacular, "hell" in Sherman’s, but by any current definition, organized trillion-dollar mayhem -- marauding battalions, bombing missions, beautiful ancient cities laid to waste, slaughtered kids and moms, and plenty of good old-fashioned dismemberment. All Halliburton had to do – in exchange for untold billions of no-bid cash dollars – was ignore every known law, regulation and rule of accountability. Audits? Massive overcharges? Highway robbery? Whatever. Don’t expect Cheney’s company to get so much as a glimpse of oversight from a Repugnican House under DeLay’s replacement Roy Blount, who says Congress need not concern itself with oversight, if at all, until at least "the sixth year of a presidency" (i.e., before mid-term elections.)

The impact of 9/11, profound as it may be, is dwarfed by the impact of the Bush-Cheney regime. If anything has altered reality, it is the ascendancy of these sickos to the highest positions of human power in our universe. Every aspect of geopolitical reality has been transformed by this mad cabal in a mere five horrific years. The world is indeed a different place since 9/11, due not to straw dog villains like Osama but to methodical perpetrators of raw all-encompassing evil like the Bush-Cheney gang. They have delivered to the earth and its dwellers a regime of toxicity and death. They have turned the clock back and resuscitated old and nearly-conquered demons and threats to our collective well-being and our very survival. They have breathed new life and vitality into the most dread scourges of our planet: disease, overpopulation, nuclear proliferation, environmental holocaust, torture, war crimes, genocide.

What does it take to be a war or disease monger, to extol pocket-lining over every human value and need? What kind of people thrive on mass death and misery? Who on earth would eagerly provoke global religious conflict? And what kind of people support such policies with pride and vehemence? Who the hell sports a "Bush-Cheney" sticker at this point, for crying out loud?

Republicans. We are at the point now where Republicanism - an irredeemable unrepentant philosophy of greed and exploitation – can not be separated from the atrocities and devastation it is now wreaking without cessation wherever its reach extends. Dick Cheney’s party can not be separated from Dick Cheney’s actions. His lies and thievery and barbarism cannot be separated form the organization he heads. Republicanism, as epitomized by Dick Cheney, has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had. It has absolutely nothing to recommend it and can boast at this point no more than a tiny handful of credible remotely human spokespeople. Republicanism is no longer a tenable philosophy for anyone who is not a card-carrying Hun. It’s gotta go. Through every legitimate and lawful remedy and process at our disposal, Republicanism can and must be eradicated.

Jimmy Lohman

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

Jimmy Lohman is a human rights lawyer and musician in Austin, Texas, and an occasional contributor to BuzzFlash.