Seeing the Full Cheney: America Held Hostage, Yr 6

January 20, 2007, marked the sixth year of America being held hostage by a rogue government.

The latest in a daily series of symbols of this betrayal is how our GIs continue to be pawns in the chess game of death being played out by Cheney and Bush – and Bush and Cheney are as suited to playing chess as Britney Spears is to singing opera.

Not long ago, as we noted in another BuzzFlash editorial, Nancy Pelosi warned that the White House was speeding up the escalation of troops (labeled for PR purposes with the Frank Luntz focus-group-tested term: "surge") in order to insulate the move from criticism. The administration claimed that sane people who opposed them were putting the troops "in harm’s way." A White House spokesperson called Pelosi’s accurate analysis "poisonous," declaring that Pelosi was questioning the motives of Bush, as if this were akin to criticizing Jesus.

Last week, Cheney -- in one of his now infamous interviews -- dared Congress to pass a resolution condemning the escalation in troops or capping funds for the war in Iraq because it would put the troops in harm’s way. The new Cheney mini-me at the Department of Defense (Gates) let slip the other day that he suddenly needs to "speed" up the increase of troops to Iraq.

Are you getting the picture here?

The GIs, the Iraqis, American citizens -– we are all pawns in a chess game played by guys who, if they lose a move, they try and swipe all of the other player’s pieces off the board, because they don’t have an inkling of how to play by the rules. All they know is thuggish force –- and believing that they’ve got bigger "ones" than the multi-pronged and ever-evolving "enemy" out of Orwell’s 1984.

This is playing by caveman rules. The winner is the person who batters anyone who doesn’t give them what they want. It’s really that simple.

The first step in America being held hostage to a rogue executive branch began with the still unexplained choice of Dick Cheney as Bush’s vice-presidential candidate. Here was a washed-up D.C. insider with a critical heart problem who played the "senior statesman" role of heading up the search committee for a Bush running-mate for the 2000 election.

Then, inexplicably, for reasons and stratagems still unknown to this day, Cheney mysteriously ended up as the announced candidate himself. It was one of the most curious moments in American presidential history. As usual, the corporate press let it pass with hardly a raised eyebrow or exploratory analysis. But it was the beginning of the erosion of democracy and a national posture of war that Cheney declared last week might last through several administrations.

We could speculate all we want on the decisive moment when Junior’s mind was manipulated into choosing Cheney -– who, if last week’s series of arrogant, defiant, and calculatedly preposterous interviews made clear anything, it is that Cheney is the behind-the-scenes president for foreign policy. One could go with the theory that Cheney played the artful royal courtier and manipulated Junior like a marionette into choosing him as VP, with the fawning words of praise and empowerment that he never heard from Bush I, his actual father.

But it really doesn’t matter how this oddest of vice-presidential "selections" occurred; at this point, it’s the utterly ruinous impact on our Constitution, democracy and our foreign relations that resulted from it that is the matter at hand.

As we noted recently on BuzzFlash, an administration that can steal an election –- as this one did in 2000 -– is emboldened to steal the whole government, and such has been the case.

Cheney’s astonishing emergence from the shadows last week in a series of defiant, arrogant interviews that evidenced a disdain for democracy, contempt for anything that doesn’t go his way, lack of concern for human life, and Nero-esque proclamations that revealed the big Nero behind Junior (who just gets to pretend he’s Nero) ... well, it was a performance of such unilateral imperial assertion that it would have left our founding patriots scurrying off with their muskets to seize back democracy from the Red Coats now ensconced in the White House.

The sensationally Royalist Cheney interviews came -– and perhaps not coincidentally -– at a time when the Libby perjury trial is revealing much more than "Scooter’s" lying to federal prosecutors. Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecutorial tour de force is providing evidence to the public that Cheney orchestrated the outing of an operative who specialized in tracking the illicit sales of Weapons of Mass Destruction (and thereby Cheney endangered the national security of the United States of America), authorized the leaking of classified information, and manipulated the corporate press as if it were a hand puppet.

Trying to figure out what is really going on in this secretive, Kremlinesque Bush-Cheney regime is often like trying to figure out what is going on in the old Soviet Politburo by seeing where leaders stood in officially released group photographs –- or whether they were in them at all.

But BuzzFlash will venture to speculate that Cheney sees a rapidly deteriorating political crisis at hand and that Junior isn’t up to "pushing back" the media and public, so Dick decided to take the crowbar out himself and start pummeling opponents of the regime. Sometimes the Godfather has to go public as the chief enforcer, because the front man isn’t up to the job. That’s what Cheney is doing.

Cheney basically told the American people last week: "F**k Off! I am the government. Live with it."

And so, in the absence of divine intervention on an assertion of sanity on Capitol Hill –- or a restoration of the American Revolutionary Militia -– he’ll have his way with us.

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