I’ve noticed this portrait of Cheney has started to spread across the web just within the part two days. I post it here because it needs to be spread as a warning… and maybe to encourage those who still can bring action against at least his lawyers will do so.
I am also embarrassed. I consider myself a damn good judge of character. My wife tends to agree: when I warn her of someone I do tend to be fairly spot on. I was horribly wrong when it came to Cheney. From the moment I heard of Bush, then saw him, then heard him speak… I knew this was one person no one should ever give power to. Someone who perhaps has a mental illness so severe he should either be in prison, or a mental hospital. While my feelings about that assessment were a little less solid than “absolutely positive,” I have always known a bully when I see one: especially when he’s a brutal bully with absolutely no conscience.
I’ve never been wrong that I know of in that regard.
But Cheney? I actually said to my wife, “If we could only reverse the ticket then; if they win, I won’t feel as bad.” During debates and interviews he seemed sane, though mistaken on many issues. How the hell could I have been so horribly wrong? Was George Bush simply providing cover for the soft spoken, semi-rational sounding, Cheney… just waiting to get in office so he could burst forth from his fascistic, authoritarian, homicidal-crazy cocoon?
So, as a penance of sorts, I provide a portrait far more accurate…
“The German people were told that the Jews were a menace to their health, their safety, and their national security, and once that idea got sold to the masses, history records the resulting horrors. The American people were told that hordes of Islamic fundamentalists wanted to cut off our heads, and to avoid such assaults, we had no choice but to emulate the methods and tactics that had served our former WWII foes so well.”
You’re not the only one, Ken. Even some of Cheney’s good friends from the first Poppy Bush Regime said he’d become a different, more secretive and darker man as Junior’s Veep and they couldn’t talk to him anymore. Some speculate he went mad; others say he was already that way and hid it all those years.
A nurse acquaintance has an interesting explanation: Cheney may be having a rare psychotic reaction to the heart medication he takes as a pacemaker recipient. She said it can change one’s personality, and even make them delusional. He may be on heavy-duty pain killers, as well, and those can do a job on your psyche, causing paranoia, delusions of grandeur and overreaction to imagined threats.