Two thoughts on the current presence of Dick Cheney and his masterful ability to actually achieve something not unlike human form

* What Cheney's doing has a legal name:

* It's called SEDITION.

* Obama may be -- to our disappointment -- not opening up the records and allowing the DoJ to throw down on the sadists and monsters that are right now crawling out of the Nixon-Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Establishment. (And former FBI agent made it pretty clear in his statement that it was possibly nothing more than some sadistic -- possibly sexual -- that drove the Cheney policy of what he's now afraid to allow people to call by its proper name -- torture.)

* This concerted, continuing, public campaign to undermine the legitimate, legally-elected government used to be a felony. Is it not still?

* This band of vermin tried their best during Bill Clinton's administration to do a congressional coup of the legal government. Didn't work.

* Next they bribed the Supreme court to quasi-legitimize their sock-puppet. Easy enough to look back over government records to see how family members were appointed to plum jobs -- of course THEY might argue it wasn't payoff at all but merely appointing people they could count on to help carry out the policy of intimidation and repression.

* And now this creature of darkness and hate, this thing who needed to stay out of the light because -- perhaps -- he could only achieve human form intermittently -- is continually trying to agitate the discontents to the point of -- and I have no doubt this has crossed his mind -- to the point of assassination. (Is it wrong to vilify someone who insists that it's ok to torture someone because that person SCARES HIM? I don't think so.)

* And about which he'll innocently point to himself and say "Me? Why I never wanted anyone to HARM the president."

* And we'll believe that as much as we believe anything else he says. But if that horrible event happens, it will be -- as with JFK -- too late and another 40+ years until human beings have someone to lead and stand up to this conspiracy of unwholesome creatures who have crawled out from under the rocks that keep the light away from them.

* And people will say: "Too bad we never got to see what he could do."

* Because it will kill the dream once more. And even if we don't believe Cheney and his hench-creatures actually want assassination, a wise man told me, back when people were pointing a finger at him and his for conspiring to create 9-11, "Of course they didn't do it. But what horrifies us is -- now that it's done -- we know in our hearts they were CAPABLE of doing it for their own benefit."

* To quote Orson Welles' character in the movie of Catch-22:

* "What do you mean I (we) can't just have this man taken out and shot?"

* Well, like torture, if we become what we right now behold, that would pretty much complete their agenda.

* But it is NOT premature to begin pressing charges against Cheney (and his co-conspirators) for sedition.

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So it's still "Does torture work?" Even though we now KNOW it wasn't what got us the info.

I guess it's a success that Cheney and his hench-creatures have managed to shift the dialogue from torture being the historically monstrous signature of sexually-sick creatures that we -- I certainly hope -- do NOT wish to become -- to

"Does it Work? If there were a ticking bomb... If Jack Bauer were a real person, you'd have to agree."

This is the new form of the unbelievably same old tired the boot camp question asked back during draft years:

"Private -- what if a battalion of Red Chinese were raping your mother? Would you have an ethical problem THEN?"

It's been a long time, but that's pretty close to verbatim, the question I was asked back then.

(The fact that the base chaplain's actual Sunday sermon was "Why Jesus would have been a Marine," may be irrelevant other than to provide new scripts for Superman's Bizarro-World comics.)

And yet, like Charlie Brown and the football we fall for it every time.

Excuse the profanity, but the quote that best summed it up was from Charles Bukowski:

"Wars, politics, causes -- for thousands of years we've ended up with a sack of shit. It's time we learned to think."

But of course the concerted onslaught of politics and media and entertainment all seems to have the effect to interfere with the ability to think. "But what if Jack Bauer were a REAL person? What smartass kind of remark would you make THEN?"

Yeah, but he isn't. And -- to some extent -- neither are the people who ask that question.

-- Saintperle