Now word comes down that former American Supreme Leader Richard “Shotgun Dick” Cheney had his own assassination squad, answerable to no branch of government but his office. Or his undisclosed location. It has long been apparent that the nominal President during Cheney’s 8 years in power, George Bush The Younger, was only a puppet figure, subordinate to Shotgun Dick and himself unable to put two coherent sentences together, never mind run the federal government. After a second term was secured, all pretense of Cheney being only the Vice President was dropped. Sort of like Putin in Russia getting around the term limits for a president by having his own puppet elected and getting himself appointed Prime Minister, another supposedly second banana position, at least on paper. No one on the planet is unaware of this arrangement and who calls the shots in Russia.
We already know that Cheney was the architect of the Iraq War, the champion of torture for torture’s sake, the transfer of trillions of dollars from the working classes to the super rich, the campaign of illegal domestic spying on American citizens and the legislative attempts to gut the Bill of Rights. A pretty impressive resume for a Vice President, who is legally allowed to do none of these things. Impressive in a nasty, criminal and traitorous way, that is. He is also suspected of blowing the cover of an American spy for political gain and allowing his buddies in the oil industry to steal millions of dollars worth of Iraq’s oil every single day of the Iraqi occupation. The thinking here is that what we have here is our own real live, home grown, rootin-tootin’ Augusto Pinochet on our hands.
Who, you say? That would be President of Chile Augusto Pinochet, a one-man reign of terror during his 16 years of dictatorship of that unfortunate nation. He led a military junta that staged a coup against and killed the elected incumbent president, with backing from the CIA, also one of Shotgun Dick’s favorite tools for his global crimes. Pinochet held onto the reins of power until he was 75 years old and killed, kidnapped and tortured many thousands of his countrymen. He was famous for having traveling hit squads who would go to any nation on earth to assassinate his enemies. He retired but still retained a lot of power within Chile, avoiding prosecution for the 300 criminal charges leveled against him, including human rights violations, assassinations, kidnappings and plain old murders just for the hell of it.
In his late 80’s he was arrested in England as a result of the government of Spain issuing an arrest warrant for killing Spanish citizens and put on trial in London. What Chile could not do, the international community tried to do, but he was never convicted of even jaywalking. He played the old age, illness and dementia cards and got out of the international charges, winding up under house arrest for a while back in Chile. He never saw the inside of a jail cell, dying at age 91 before a scheduled trial for murder, torture and kidnaping in Chile. It was discovered after his death that the frugal living Augusto Pinochet was also a thief, having amassed a vast fortune despite earning only a modest official salary.
Well, Chile, we’ve got Cheney! Take that! While he only had half of old Augusto’s 16 years to torture people and might be a little shy of his total in that all important evil dictator statistic, he’s responsible for even more killings! Nearly 5,000 of his own nation’s soldiers plus God knows how many tens of thousands of Iraqis. Now with the revelation of his own private assassination squad, there’s a chance that Shotgun Dick could take the Western Hemisphere title for extra-territotrial “sanctions.” You’ve just got to love the word “sanctions” as a euphemism for murder, eh? How CIA is that? And like Pinochet, nobody has laid a glove on him prosecution-wise!
And Dick is old and supposedly sickly too, having had more heart attacks than Fred Sanford. But he’s been having a lot of high-tech spare parts installed in him, and seems to have a new lease on life. He has been positively gregarious and high profile lately after 8 years of “no-comment” and slithering from one secret hideout to another when he was in power. It seems he couldn’t be prouder of his introduction of torture to the United States military, and positively passionate in his defense of his war crimes, even though nobody has accused him of anything yet. Could it be that he’s trying to legitimize his crimes and head off an unscheduled trip to The Hague in case he’s ever of a mind to travel abroad?
Perhaps mindful of Pinochet’s foibles as a European tourist, Shotgun Dick hasn’t stepped a foot outside of the United States since leaving office. He has stepped foot in any TV studio that will have him, mocking President Obama for playing it straight and obeying the laws and the Constitution of The United States like a big sissy. He’s getting all lathered up on a regular basis for the cameras, crying foul over the dismantling of his private Spanish Inquisition, the ingratitude of the American people for voting his party completely out of power and the attempts of the current administration to restore economic order after Cheney so diligently removed any pesky regulation and oversight from the people who handle everybody’s money.
He was Corporate America’s ultimate man on the inside and ran the nation for the exclusive benefit of the very wealthiest Americans and its largest corporations. The man who obtained 6 deferments from the military draft during the Vietnam War because, in his own words, “I had other priorities,” had no problem at all using our brave and dedicated youngsters in the military as expendable pawns in his global schemes for stealing oil and wealth. He used the attacks of 9/11/2001 on this nation as a handy tool to promote fear and further his agenda, regardless of the consequences. And the consequences to his nation are a collapsed economy and two quagmire wars. The consequences to him personally? He’s richer than ever, no one is trying to send him to trial in The Hague and he’s got a new career as a TV star. Who says America doesn’t breed dictators? When someone brings that one up, just say this: “Well, what about old Shotgun Dick?”