Dick Cheney’s Fingerprints

I wrote a book with that title fifteen years ago, when Dick was still with us, and his crimes against humanity still fresh in our minds. Cheney Died a couple weeks back, and flags flew at half-mast across America in fluttering agony.

Don’t ever confuse Dick with his daughter, Liz. She was (and is) a true patriot, and one of the few left in the Republican party. So, they ran (and financed) a candidate against her, drumming her out of office.

They say ‘time wounds all heels,’ and so it is with Dick.

But my memory is longer than most, and Dick Cheney’s Fingerprints began shortly after 9-11, and follows how he enabled the lies and liars who got us into that debacle. Along with his axe-man, David Addington, Cheney was the force behind ‘enhanced interrogation’ and the illegality and disgrace America showed itself capable of at Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo.

To deny it is as wrongheaded as denying the Holocaust…the evidence is there.

Torture was on the menu during wartime for the first time in American history, and our reputation lay in tatters world-wide when the photographic evidence of that torture became known. Some minor players went to jail, as minor players are called upon to do.

But the orders, and the very plan, came from as high as the presidency.

Let me say a word or two about reputation.

When I was a kid, my father talked a good bit to me about reputation, and what it meant. No matter what the subject was, from what kind of tires to put on the car to where he did his banking, reputation was what meant most to him. He could get over a little higher price and wink at the cheaper alternative, if reputation was at stake.

He’s been gone now some sixty years, but he’d be hot about how Cheney, Addington and Bush turned America into a cheap imitation of the great nation he knew. He may have disliked FDR and the New Deal, but he never called them sell-outs. He thought they were wrong, but wrong was something you argued about.

This small bunch that stampeded our heritage (and they are a small-minded bunch) sold off our greatest strengths as a nation, at a discount.

And they did it in the name of fear of another terrorist attack, as if we ordinary folks were somehow too weak and scared and stupid to see our way through to a solution.

Not squaring with the American public is as crooked as politics can get.

Cheney and his crowd destroyed our world reputation as a nation of law, justice, and opportunity. In its place, their fabricated chimera of national intent made us an international pariah, if it weren’t that we are so feared.

Can you believe that? America, the land of the free and the brave—feared, like some hoodlum on the street.

I want very much to move away from this Cheney fable that ‘we do not torture.’

But it cannot be backed away from, and we can bury the man, but dare not bury his history.

It’s too dark to be called a legacy, and we have enough darkness these days in government. It’s hard to separate the denigration of the man from denigration of his actions. We all have things we have done in our lives of which we’re not proud, yet they do not define us, or so we hope.

Dick Cheney is such a man, but he must have done many things right to have brought up Liz.

Let’s give him that, and move on.