“Our security, and the security of our friends around the world, can only be guaranteed with a fundamental reversal of the policies of the past six years.” D. Cheney, June 17. 2014

Dick Cheney: He Takes a Lickin’ and Keeps on Tickin’

No need to think. Why gather facts, analyze them, submit them to tests, to critical analysis, draw limited conclusions about them, and submit your thoughts for peer review? When you have the truth, assert it! It’s the essence of propaganda, the foundation of rigid religions, and the lifeblood of ideologues.

It’s also the bane of human intelligence, it revels in shallowness, reeks of ecclesiastical rhetoric, wraps itself in ideology, and spoon feeds its tripe to the masses. It’s Josef Goebbels on a platter. And nobody serves it up better than Dick Cheney.

In order to be effective, the propagandist must first immerse himself in himself. No credentials? No problem. You may recall that Cheney took five student deferments to avoid serving in the Vietnam war. He dismissed questions about his lack of backbone with the comment “I had other priorities at the time.” When his safety was assured he dropped out of school without finishing and never looked back. Later, George H.W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense. (That appointment still boggles rational minds). A decade later, he was one leg of the triad that masterminded the Iraq war. He didn’t waver with his pronouncement in misleading the world: “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and he intends to use them on us.” When reminded of these words that shall forever live in infamy, he simply shrugs. Wrong about WMD, wrong about costs, wrong about duration, wrong about American lives lost, wrong about casualties, and wrong about consequences in the region. His response to all those wrongs: “It’s all Obama’s fault.”

Never the shy one, he again started at the top with his appointment as CEO of Halliburton, a company that was destined to land lavish government contracts in Iraq. No collusion or conflicts of interest there. After all, he had resigned before the war started and presumably rode off into the sunset with $41 million in a retirement package. His connectedness continued during his VP tenure when G.W. Bush gave him the additional title of Energy Czar. He quickly organized secret meetings with key oil figures from across the country, then just as quickly refused to reveal the contents of his discussions with them under the guise that his meetings were “privileged” and not subject to public scrutiny. Think about his defensive posture for a moment: He was a public official, elected by the public to conduct the public’s business, yet he asserted that the business he conducted was privileged. Now hold onto your chairs. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with him. About all we know of his sources and methods to this day is this: During his tenure, the price of oil went up four hundred percent.

They say that all good things must come to an end. But that must be one hell of a battery pack that keeps his transplanted heart pumping. Perhaps it takes less energy to pump ice water. Whatever it is that keeps his ticker ticking, he probably has a big financial interest in the company. But he never talks about his personal gains. That’s privileged information…and he has other priorities. His song has ended, but the melody lingers on, and on, and on...