Editorial -- The Irony of Supporting Liz Cheney

A book title we’d like to see sometime is, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dick Cheney.” Today, the Democrats are swooning over Liz Cheney, the defeated Congresswoman from Wyoming, who is now contemplating presidential ambitions. Unlike most Republicans on January 6th, she took a stand for the impeachment of Trump, the rule of law, our system of government, and participated in the hearings to expose the former President. Some Democrats are even pushing her to run for President so she can stick it to Donald Trump. The problem is, they need to be careful what they wish for. In 2016, Hillary Clinton deliberately elevated Donald Trump because she thought he would be the easiest candidate to beat. We all remember how that turned out.

It is ironic that the Democrats are holding up the former Vice President’s daughter as the exemplar of virtue for conservatives to follow. In 2000, the Democrats accused George Bush and Dick Cheney of stealing the election, aided and abetted by the Supreme Court. There were more allegations of vote fraud and rigging in 2004 after John Kerry narrowly lost that year. Mr. Cheney was held up as the example of all that was evil in the GOP. He was seen as a war criminal who never met a war he didn’t like, who was the real mastermind behind the Bush Administration, and who would stop at nothing, including putting American lives in danger, to further the narratives of the Bush Administration.

Now, the Democrats want us to forget all that in 2022. But we can’t. For all her loud talk about the rule of law, Liz Cheney voted with Donald Trump 93% of the time. And what if history repeats itself, the Democrats elevate Cheney in 2024 like they did Donald Trump in 2016, and she wins? We would have even more wars, even more bloodlust, the danger of a four front war with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, and even more roads and bridges falling into disrepair as the Cheney Administration fuels ever increasing sums of money into wars of choice.

George Bush was the worst President in US History, and Dick Cheney, of course, was the 2nd in charge. After the 9/11 attacks, we had a unique opportunity to shape the world for the better. President Putin was one of the first people to call Bush after the attacks, and people were willing to follow our lead.

But instead of using the attacks to usher in an era of goodwill, Bush used it to carry out a war of choice and a personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and who shot terrorists. Over 1 million civilians died in a US effort to prop up an Iraqi government that nearly fell to ISIS after Barack Obama fulfilled a campaign promise and left. Instead of the Pax Americana that we could have had, other countries would no longer accept our leadership. 

In 2007, President Putin of Russia gave a speech in Munich in which he decried what he saw as the US monopolistic dominance in global relations, and its uncontrolled reliance on the use of force. In effect, he was flipping everyone the bird. One does not have to defend any of the actions of Putin subsequent to that speech to see that the policies of perpetual warfare that Bush championed and that Joe Biden has brought back have led to this state of affairs. 

George Bush was the worst President in US History because his policies destroyed the system of Pax Americana that the collapse of Communism in 1989 created. Instead of being a country that everyone else looked up to, many nations saw us as a nation to be feared and wondered if they were next. For instance, Kim Jong-Un built up North Korea’s nuclear program because he knew full well what happens to countries such as Libya which give up their nukes and are later bombed into the Stone Age.

We regard Mr. Bush as the worst in US History over a few others. James Buchanan stood on the wrong side of history on the slavery issue, but it would have been difficult for any US President to stop the slide towards Civil War. Herbert Hoover ushered in the Great Depression and was trounced by the biggest margin of any incumbent US President in history. But the Depression was worldwide, and it would have been difficult for any US President to stop it. Under Donald Trump, we were in perpetual crisis mode, with one crisis after another coming one right after the other, and he three times brought us to the brink of war with Iran and once with North Korea.  But we were already in decline thanks to the Bush era. Bill Clinton, while he presided over a period of prosperity, gutted our local communities with NAFTA and the China Agreement, planting the seeds for the rise of Trump.

So with Bush being the worst president in history, why are the Democrats trying to rehabilitate him and Cheney? They have the perpetual warfare thing down pat. For Joe Biden, the only mistake that Bush made was in not arming proxies to do our dirty work. But there is a big difference between Ukraine and Iraq. Russia is a nuclear armed country fully capable of destroying us in an instant if they wanted to, just like we could them. If Ukraine turns into a shooting war between the US and Russia, then it could quickly spiral into a nuclear war that nobody would win.

Open Letter to George Bush and Dick Cheney from a Dying Iraq War Veteran

by Tomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.
I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Tomas Young is an Iraq War Veteran on hospice care at his home in Kansas City. He is the subject of a documentary, Body of War, which chronicles how he adapts to his massive injuries sustained in the war.

Obama Accused of Morphing Into Cheney

Michael Klare in Tom's Dispatch compares Obama to Bush in his appetite for military action. He quotes foreign policy people as calling him "George Bush on Steroids."
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Obama protested the Bush involvement in Iraq, saying he was not against all wars, but against "dumb wars." In his view, Bush expended thousands of American lives when he could have used technology -- drones, targeted strikes, assassinations, covert operations -- to accomplish the same objectives.
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Obama's rationale is clear -- he rationalizes that he is saving lives through these methods by using technology and black ops that would have required a multiple-front war in previous times. Or Vietnam on a worldwide scale.
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As for energy policy, Cheney believed that oil was so fundamental to the world's economy that it was sometimes necessary for the US to go to war to prevent someone else from controlling the world's oil supplies. He was one of the pushers for war against Saddam both times.
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This sort of thinking has led to out of control deficits; after all, the ends justified the means in Cheney's view.
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The unemployment problem could be solved tomorrow if we wanted to solve it. Simply take all the money that is being waged on all these covert wars and use it to rehire every teacher, policeman, and firefighter laid off since Bush/Cheney took office in 2001 and the unemployment rate would drop below 7.
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Obama is now mimicking Cheney's geopolitical oil games in many respects, such as his boasting about more and more offshore drilling. In fact, we have opened more than 75% of our potential offshore oil and gas resources for drilling under Obama, as he himself said this year in his State of the Union Address.
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The article goes on to talk about Obama's plan of expanding our network of bases and alliances surrounding China. It is ironic that Vietnam is included in this network, given that we fought a war against them just one generation ago.
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This is dangerous brinksmanship on Obama's part, given the fact that the UN was formed by the five major powers after World War II -- the US, UK, France, USSR, and China. It was formed to prevent a third world war and was set up in a way that requires the Big Five to cooperate in order to get things done. While we can and should take a stand against human rights abuses in China and everywhere, we must also engage in a cooperative relationship with our other four partners.
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Klaire concludes:

But as history suggests, engaging in aggressive global geopolitical confrontations with other determined, well-armed players usually leads to friction, crisis, war, and disaster.
In this regard, Cheney’s geopolitical maneuvering led us into two costly Middle Eastern wars while heightening tensions with both China and Russia.  President Obama claims he seeks to build a more peaceful world, but copying the Cheney energy blueprint is bound to produce the exact opposite.
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Brinksmanship over cooperation and reliance on oil over developing new forms of energy means less and less money domestically to build roads and bridges, maintain adequate funding for our schools, and preserving our national infrastructure, and hiring more teachers, firefighters, and police. But that has been the Washington Way since 1945 even as it fundamentally undermines our way of life.

Barnes ties Graves to Cheney on oil.

While American consumers are getting slammed at the gas pumps and oil companies report record profits, the only solution Republicans can come up with is to send Vice President Dick Cheney to the Middle East to beg OPEC to take pity on us and lower oil prices. At the same time, Missouri 6th District Congressman Sam Graves stands by the big oil companies and their tax breaks while voting against legislation to fund alternative fuels that will help break our dependence on foreign oil.

Kay Barnes, candidate for the 6th District, issued the following statement:

“Sending Dick Cheney to the Middle East to beg OPEC to take pity on the United States makes it apparent now more than ever that the Bush Administration has lost touch with the day to day economic struggles of American families. As we pay more than $3.20 a gallon at the pump, its time for our government to get serious about a real energy policy in this country. Dick Cheney has been the leading advocate for the failed energy policies that George Bush has promoted in the White House and Sam Graves has supported in Congress. Just two weeks ago Graves once again joined Bush and Cheney and stood with the big oil companies and defended their tax breaks while voting against using those tax dollars to fund alternative energies like ethanol, solar and wind power. You cannot expect the persons who caused this problem to be part of the solution. And that is why we need a change in leadership in Washington."

Cheney is leaving for the Middle East on Sunday.

See: http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=8388615&msgid=114246&act=JEFV&c=230867&admin=0&destination=http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/10/mideast/cheney.php
On February 27 Graves voted against the Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Act, which would reverse the unwarranted tax breaks that President Bush and the previous Congress handed over to the big oil companies, which this year have shown world-record profits, and redirect them instead toward renewable energy sources. The production tax credits and other incentives in the legislation for alternatives like wind energy and ethanol facilities would benefit many Northwest Missouri communities.