Who is Dick Cheney? Really?
What is the man doing?
Is he a patriot?
Does he love America?
Does he fear for the safety of its citizens?
Is he a statesman who values what America stands for?
Does he value its history?
Here are some answers:
He is exercising his right to express himself. But given the responsibility inherent in having served high profile terms in government and given the content of his recent pronouncements set against the current instability of the economy at home and abroad he is, in the exercise of that right, practicing nothing less than sedition.
This is a man who arranged to be deferred from military service five times yet has stood behind the crucifying of actual war heroes like Max Cleland and John Kerry and behind the devaluing of all those American soldiers who went into engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan underfunded, under-supplied and under-protected, as well as their care after they had so nobly served.
He has been behind the unprecedented manipulation and gutting of the Constitution of the United States, taking power from The People and placing it squarely in the Oval Office.
He has presided over the spreading of paranoia and fear across the psychological expanse of this country in order to execute his personal agenda of profit.
He has determined that America take a unilateral course of aggressive action in order to secure its position as the world's only super power.
He values his country's history the way Machiavelli valued his. To him, American history is not the story of a people struggling with the responsibility of freedom for all men and women, a concept that is not instinctive in the human animal but one which must be fought for and nurtured with precision and care. For Dick Cheney rather, his behavior both private and public points clearly to a man who has disdain for his country and the people who live in it, who views America as a business which has turned only a paltry profit, hasn't flexed its muscles with sufficient cruelty, has employed too little civil restraint, has given too much freedom to a people who neither deserve nor have the intelligence to understand it.
And even though he clothes himself in the trappings of the patriot, he is in fact the traitor in our midst. His recent media tour, again while within his right, is every bit as disturbing and incendiary as the vitriol that issues forth from the froth-flecked mouths of religious zealots who cry for holy war. His pronouncements about the various dangers to our country -- dangers he and his cadre of neo-con co-conspirators have helped create and/or exacerbate -- are not well-meant warnings but attempts to extend his nefarious influence over the national landscape, to keep people jittery and vulnerable enough to preserve his own relentless agenda of personal profit and perpetual power.
With the help of his ministry of propaganda Fox News and the autonomous bilge pump Limbaugh, Dick Cheney broadcasts his fear mongering messages, fomenting a shadow illegitimate movement more potentially virulent than any media-fanned terror of Swine Flu and exploiting the very fear he helped to create. If not dealt with, if his actions are left unchallenged and unchecked, the potential for civil division and instability is greater than it has been since the days leading up to the Civil War.
The stark contrast between Dick Cheney and President Obama bespeaks the contrast in devotion to this country and its citizens.
President Obama respects and values America and all for which and for whom it stands. Dick Cheney on the other hand, simply does not. That's who Dick Cheney really is.