Well, Satan died last week, or at least so I'm told. Speaking personally, I won't sleep easier until I see a body because that neocon fossil should have died centuries ago. I can't help but to feel like the final girl in some cheesy 80s slasher flick, waiting for one last jump-scare after the killer was shot 84 times, set on fire and dropped from a skyscraper. Dick Cheney was the killer, literally and figuratively, and I'll believe that monster has finally left us when I see his open casket lowered into an active volcano.
What else can I say about that putrid creature that I haven't been saying for the last twenty years. Dick Cheney was not a politician; he was one of modern histories most successful psychopaths and I don't believe any of this to be hyperbole. This man made his callous ambitions to rule the world through constant warfare and turn Washington into an omnipotent new Rome violently clear on multiple occasions through multiple administrations. Let's take a quick look at the stats, shall we.
After lurking around the darker corners of the Nixon Administration, Dick first achieved real power under Gerald Ford as his White House Chief of Staff. It was here that he found true love with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the two budding young sociopaths kicked off their lifelong partnership by out-ghouling the then world champion Washington vampire, Henry Kissinger, who as Secretary of State was attempting to avert a third world war through strategic arms control with the Soviet Union.
Dick and Rummy had a problem with this. The two established a clique of young super hawks with similarly Machiavellian underlings of Senate Armed Services Chairman Henry "Scoop" Jackson like Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams, and together what became known as "Team B" sabotaged Kissinger's attempts at detente and affectively hobbled Soviet-American relations for another generation, but these kids were just getting started. This crew would go on to form the nucleus for what became the Neoconservative Movement, a national socialist cabal devoted to unabashed American global domination by any means necessary.
Cheney would spend most of the 80s as a representative for Wyoming's at-large congressional district where he continued to make every attempt to escalate the ultraviolence of the Cold War, becoming one of the more vocal cheerleaders for Ronald Reagan's numerous genocidal Central American death squads. But Dick wouldn't make his true global ambitions obscenely clear until the Berlin Wall was already crumbling in the twilight of the Soviet-era when George H.W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Defense in the late eighties.
It was from this vaunted cabinet position that Cheney oversaw two of the more grotesque displays of post-Cold War American power against two of America's more defenseless Cold War allies: Noriega's Panama and Saddam's Iraq, with Operation Just Cause and Operation Desert Storm.
As Jean Baudrillard astutely observed, neither one of these operations was an actual fucking war; rather, they were highly publicized acts of unilateral slaughter committed with the careful collaboration of Washington's useful idiots in the burgeoning 24/7 news media for the purpose of sending the world two messages; Vietnam was a fluke and America' rules the world now. They were right about the second one, but only briefly.
This thinly veiled threat to the global community was articulated further in no uncertain terms with a leaked document known as the DPG or Defense Planning Guidance, which Cheney had Direct Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz draft in the glorious afterglow of their bloodbath in the Gulf. In this document another one of Dick's lifelong neocon flunkies set out a long-term strategy for American global dominance which explicitly advocated Washington primacy over a divided Eurasia so as to deter "potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global scale."
Wolfowitz also suggested toppling rogue regimes for possessing weapons of mass destruction to do so, a position further driven home when Team B got back together for the now infamous Project for a New American Century.
After spending the second half of the nineties as the CEO for the world's second largest oil service company, Haliburton, Dick was ready to put this plan into practice. As the Vice President for his former employer's born-again dunce of a son, Cheney and his neocons infiltrated the highest echelons of American power and successfully used the totally preventable attacks of September 11th to consolidate America's entire national security apparatus beneath the shadow of the Executive Office, allowing Cheney to acquire more power than any president, let alone vice president, in American history.
And the rest is history. Ugly history. And that history continues to unfurl like the tentacles of Cthulhu to this day. The history of forever wars, of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Gaza and Iran. The history of Abu Ghraib and the Islamic State. The history of warrantless wiretaps, waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, drone strikes and serial regime change. The history of the War on Terror. A heinous era of imperial conquest that by the estimation of Brown University's Cost of War Project has resulted in as many as 4.7 million dead bodies and 38 million refugees in twenty years.
And yet how does America's bleeding hearts on the mainstream left remember this monster? As the courageous compassionate conservative who campaigned for Kamala with his equally loathsome daughter and received a standing ovation when visiting the Capitol on the first anniversary of the January 6 riots.
Dick Cheney is remembered as a Never Trumper and somehow, it's this absurd farce that I find most revolting. That's because no single human being on the face of the planet, not Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or Lucifer himself, has done more to make the nightmare of Donald Trump downright inevitable.
Every single crime our orange emperor commits, every single atrocity that he continues to get away with, is the direct product of Dick Cheney's relentless forty-year campaign to afford the Executive Office with the powers of a Greek god.
There were many policies and conspiracies that led us to this black and loathsome place but perhaps none stands alone as more telltale than the simple decision to prosecute the blowback of 9/11 as a war rather than a crime. This was an unprecedented legal innovation that opened Pandora's Box to a world where quite literally anyone can be declared a terrorist, and any atrocity can be justified in the name of national security so long as such decrees are hurled from the Oval Office onto the White House lawn.
So, now Donald Trump has the power to invent his own sick reality as he goes along. A refugee crisis brought on by Cheney's war machine can be declared an "invasion." The sale of soul-numbing narcotics to veterans of Cheney's conquest in the Middle East can be labeled as a campaign of "terrorism." Anyone with a green card caught bad mouthing Israel can be declared a dangerous "extremist." And entire genders can be red flagged as mental illnesses and divorced form their constitutional rights.
Not that Dick Cheney was particularly offended by any of this. I have never actually heard that man or his demonic offspring ever criticize Donald Trump for crushing poor people within the gears of the death star they idiot proofed. Such elites are far more offended by the hissy fit Trump threw at the Capitol and the fact that he has made their precious empire look tacky in front of their bougie colleagues in the EU.
But isn't this how empires always end, with tragedy repeating itself as tragic comedy?
Didn't the Julio-Claudian Dynasty end with an ego-maniacal imbecile like Emperor Nero shaming his aristocratic contemporaries with his garish amphitheaters, grotesque gladiator spectacles and gosh public displays of autoeroticism as everything the Ceasars built burned around him?
This may be the sick silver lining on Dick Cheney's long life of crime. It lasted just long enough for his criminal enterprise to humiliate him by becoming the plaything of a sadistic buffoon. This is the New American Century, one drenched in blood and flaked with gold leaf. A new Gilded Age of crippling national debt and irreversible Eurasian supremacy.
Dick Cheney wanted Washington to be the new Rome. Technically, he got what he wanted and died of a broken heart. It couldn't have happened to a nicer monster.
Peace, Love and Antipathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Angel of Death by Slayer
* I'm Not Like Everybody Else by the Kinks
* Search and Destroy by the Stooges
* Master of Puppets by Metallica
* Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones
* Fatal Flaw by Titus Andronicus
* My Plague by Slipknot
* Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears
* Hurt by Nine Inch Nails
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