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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 11 / 12, 2006
Dead Ender, Gone Hunting ...
Cheney
in a Box
By MIKE WHITNEY
It was the worst outcome imaginable.
They lost the House and the
Senate in one night with one savage blow. Even the Confederate
flag at Senator "Macakaw's" house was flying at half-mast.
Suddenly the Reich that was "built to last a thousand years"
had been reduced to small blocks of dusty-rubble extending from
sea to shining sea. At the very epicenter of the twisted-iron
and smoldering wreckage; was George W. Bush, President Hologram,
the celluloid executive whose smirking puss had appeared daily
on every American TV and in every American newspaper spreading
the "good news" of domestic repression and nonstop
war. Now, here he was, once again, convening a news conference,
dazed and ashen, propped up amid the scattered debris of a midterm
massacre; his party left in utter ruins.
Ouch!
In a moment worthy of Shakespeare,
the Fraudster-in-chief had been scuttled by his own party; knifed
in the back by his own friends and family who knew that it was
finally time to extract the drunken driver from behind the wheel
of a Mack Truck.
=The Democrats didn't win anything;
that's all hogwash. Bush was buried beneath an avalanche of bad
news which was timed to begin with the release of Bob Woodward's
book "State of Denial", followed by the National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE), Lancet's Iraqi casualty report, the Mark Foley
page fiasco, and a barrage of ethics-scandals, corruption investigations,
and intensified coverage of the war. It was a carefully-coordinated
coup intended to install "adults" (like Robert Gates)
in positions of power, change the policy in Iraq, and remove
Rumsfeld and Cheney from office.
One down; one to go.
The "vanilla" Democrats
had nothing to do with Tuesday's results. It was a "planned
demolition" from the get-go.
Robert Dreyfuss said it best
in a recent article when he opined that Bush was handled in the
same way "a family confronts an alcoholic. You bring everyone
in, and you say, Look, my friend, it's time to change.'"
(And then you remove the bad influences)
Elite powerbrokers and Republican
Party kingpins extended their hoary grip all the way into the
Oval Office and took the country back from the teenagers. But
the boulder is still only half way up the hill. After all, what
are their plans for Cheney?
Cheney wisely decided to go
hunting when he discovered that friend Rumsfeld was being led
to the gallows. Cheney's no fool. He knew that if he hung around,
he'd be blamed as the co-conspirator of the Iraqi debacle and
the subsequent destruction of the Republican Party.
So he did what Cheney always
does; he skedaddled. He suddenly discovered that he "had
more important things to do"; just like Vietnam.
He said he was going hunting,
but that's rubbish. He wanted to be as far from the political
fallout as humanly possible, so he vamoosed. There's nothing
more to it than that. Besides, there've been no reports of "downed
lawyers full of birdshot" this week in Wyoming so we know
that Cheney's firearms are still safely tucked-away in the family
vault.
Right now, Cheney is probably
huddled somewhere with his national security team, rubbing his
sweaty-hands together, figuring out how he can get back in the
game and keep his fetid plan moving forward.
Cheney is smart; real smart.
Smart like a cobra. He's not going down without a fight and he
doesn't give a damn if he takes the whole country with him.
This is all about Cheney now;
Dick Cheney, political survivor and skilled bureaucratic infighter.
If anyone thinks that he's going to sit around waiting for the
Democrats to start sniffing around the Republican corruption-cesspool;
they're crazy.
He knows what's going on. He
knows that Bush Senior, and Brzezinski, and Baker, and the rest
of the "old order" Republicans have muscled in and
are taking over. He knows he won't be able to bomb Iran, kill
another 650,000 Iraqis, or declare martial law at home. And,
he also knows that Conyers and the rest of them will be nosing-around
the Halliburton "no bid" contracts; going through every
sordid detail with a fine-tooth comb, and dredging up new scandals
on a daily basis.
He grasps all of that. He understands
the political climate and he knows that he only has two choices
left; offense or defense?
Either he steps down or he
collects his wits, gets his team together; Addington, Abrams,
Chertoff, Gonzales etc; all the guys who are "one step ahead
of the hangman"; and slaps together one "last-ditch"
effort to establish absolute-dictatorial power that will put
him forever beyond the reach of the law or of any future accountability
for his war crimes.
It's a tough task. Bush is
teetering and he's probably left the Cheney-Rumsfeld orbit already.
Robert Gates' job is to influence Bush, to win him over with
reason and, thus, move the country away from the brink of disaster.
Cheney has been removed from the policy-making apparatus and
he knows it.
So, what'll he do next?
What will Cheney do now that
he's been backed into a corner and his power is oozing away like
the blood from a sucking chest-wound?
Will he quietly retire and
disappear into the political vapor or "lock-n-load"
and go down with both guns blazing?
Here's a clue: Cheney is "dead-ender".
He won't go peacefully.
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