Monsters: Dick Cheney and O.J. Simpson

Oh, big surprise. Dick Cheney, according to a CBS poll, is less popular than the wife-beating murderer O.J. Simpson, convicted in civil court in 1997. In fact, Cheney is several times more murderous and infinitely more dangerous than Simpson, although Dick is careful to not get any blood spattered on his expensive suit. “Michael Jackson, who was alleged of sexually harassing an underage boy, and American football player O.J. Simpson, who caused a huge clamor for being suspected of murdering his wife in 1994, each maintained 25 percent and 29 percent favorable impression rates, respectively,” while Cheney came in at 18 percent. The Washington Post “pointed out that even vice president Spiro Agnew during the Nixon presidency who resigned due to tax evasion allegations still maintained a 45 percent support rate right until he resigned in 1973.”

No specific reason for Cheney’s unpopularity is cited in the article. Maybe it has to do with Cheney’s scowl, his propensity to swear at critics, or his drunken shooting of a rich fellow hunter.

Most Americans, however, are only vaguely aware of Cheney’s massive crimes against humanity, rarely put into context by the corporate media. Cheney is a vicious repeat offender, beginning with his oversight of the 43-day bombing campaign against Iraq in the summer of 1991. As a Harvard “study team had reported … the attack on Iraqi electrical, water, and sewage treatment systems,” engineered by Cheney as Bush’s Secretary of Defense (or rather Offense), was responsible for killing “thousands of civilians, especially the most vulnerable—children, the elderly, the sick,” as Robert Jensen writes. Cheney, not much different than a garden variety serial murderer, told the corporate media that “if I had to do it over again, I would do exactly the same thing,” as Ted Bundy probably would if he was still on the loose. Of course, unlike Ted Bundy, Cheney has not personally engaged in murder, but then Hitler and Charlie Manson didn’t either.

“Cheney has never repudiated this comment, never expressed contrition for the deaths of innocents that he had to have known would result from policies he helped shape and implement,” Jensen notes. “But instead of being challenged for defending the targeting of civilians, Cheney is being heralded as a politician with ‘principles’ willing to stand by his ‘convictions,’” that is to say his conviction that he is above the law (specifically, the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War).

Cheney is equivalent to the Marquis de Sade, the French aristocrat, imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris for his “dissolute imagination,” including fantasizing beating a prostitute with a red hot cat-o-nine-tails and various “blasphemous impieties.”

Cheney, according to a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, “should face war crimes charges” for his support of torturing dirt farmers and taxi drivers kidnapped in various Muslim countries and imprisoned in Guantánamo, Bagram, the “prison of darkness” in Kabul, and various CIA dungeons in Poland and Romania, the latter documented by the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

Last October, “Mr. Cheney [asked] Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture,” opined the Washington Post. “It’s not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration’s decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military.”

And then, of course, Cheney was the prime mover behind Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He repeatedly lied about Saddam’s illusory weapons of mass destruction, whole cloth fantasies dreamed up by the Straussian neocon Office of Special Plans. Cheney personally browbeat CIA analysts into adopting his lies about Iraq and WMD, and attempted to link “al-Qaeda” with Saddam (and then lied, insisting he never made this claim). In other words, in addition to getting off on mass murder and torture, Cheney is a pathological liar (mental health professionals claim pathological liars share deviant behavior such as inappropriate aggression, destruction, and serious violations of rules and laws).

Finally, as if pit bull John Bolton’s threat against Iran, delivered before the AIPAC, was not enough, now Cheney has amplified Bolton’s threat before the same audience, in fact the numero uno constituency in Washington. Cheney has threatened “meaningful consequences” against Iran, and the standard “keeping all options on the table,” in other words pursuing a campaign of shock and awe mass murder of the Iranian population and destruction of Iranian society and culture in much the same way Cheney and the Straussian neocons did and continue to do in Iraq.

Indeed, Cheney and the Straussian neocons are many times worse than O. J. Simpson or even Charlie Manson, incorrigible criminal monsters of a Hitlerian caliber, determined to pursue their lethal and even genocidal policies until they are arrested, convicted, and punished for their crimes, however remote such a prospect may be.

However, the question is not if they will continue to inflict damage on the world—beginning with the Muslim Middle East, and then moving on to North Korea, China, and eventually Russia, as promised, a series of devastating and insane campaigns that will last generations, possibly hundreds of years—but rather if we, the American people, will step forward and put an end to this madness.

Unfortunately, the way things look at present, I do not believe we will because most of us have succumbed to years of unrelenting propaganda, xenophobia, intellectual laziness, and daily two minute hate sessions via the all-pervasive idiot box, the very mantle of our civilization. In short, we give very little indication of doing much of anything except going along to get along.