Dick Cheney and 'We the enemy'

I feel almost parentally protective of my country when I say with extreme prejudice that I'd love to slap that twisted smirk off Dick Cheney's face.

What an ass, a "So what?" ass of impeachable criminality. But, alas, that remedy passed us by, thanks to an invertebrate Democratic Congress far more attentive to its own political posterior than Constitutional fidelity.

I didn't think it humanly possible, but the vice president's offensiveness is actually on the uptick. I guess he feels safe now -- see above -- and he's probably correct in further assuming that Congress will do nothing about his faits accomplis, ex post facto.

Still, I thought maybe, just maybe, the pompous swine would return quietly and invisibly to whatever subterranean section of whatever Wyoming rock he crawled out from under. No sense in his pushing his luck, right?

But boy was I wrong, as evidenced recently in Cheney's interviews with Chris Wallace of "Fox News Sunday" and Jonathan Karl of ABC News.

The vice president has been more than just unapologetic. He's been assertively, tauntingly proud of his war-crimes mentality; indeed, his recent appearances are frankly reminiscent of Hermann Göring's Nuremberg testimony -- defiant as hell and playfully demonic.

As the Washington Post rather delicately synopsized Cheney's Sunday morning romp with Wallace, the vice president touted "his central role in some of the most controversial issues of the past eight years, including the invasion of Iraq, warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens, and harsh interrogation tactics."

Controversial? Warrantless surveillance in the absence of any other legal cover is still judicially regarded, or so I thought, as outright criminal, not "controversial."

And the "harsh interrogation tactics" referred to in the Post story are still known, in the civilized world, at least, as torture. So just say it, just call it what it is. And that too is illegal, as in "criminal."

"Elisa Massimino, executive director of Human Rights First," noted the Post, "said in a statement that Cheney 'persists in defending these disgraceful policies of abuse which have been rejected by senior retired military leaders and experienced interrogators as ineffective and counterproductive.'"

Disgraceful? Harsher than controversial, for sure, but what am I missing? Why all the euphemisms? It's criminal.

And of course Cheney remains proud, mighty proud, of his extraordinarily criminal war in Iraq -- a seminal deceit he's not only glorified but revised and extended for more than just the jingoistic devotees of Fox News:

"In an interview with ABC News last week, Cheney suggested the administration would have gone to war with Iraq even without erroneous intelligence showing that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction."

The best criminal defense is a great offense, I guess, and there's no doubt they come no more offensive than Dick Cheney.

And naturally he was democratically dismissive, regally pronouncing on Fox that he "was untroubled by opinion polls showing that he and Bush are among the most unpopular White House occupants in modern times."

Unpopular, perhaps, because they demonstrated a breathtaking disregard for the rule of law? Oh, no, heavens no. Pondered Dick: "Eventually you wear out your welcome in this business."

Then, in a staggering abuse of historical perspective, he ventured that -- ho-hum -- Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt "went far beyond anything we've done in a global war on terror."

First of all, rudely untrue. But if nothing else, for Cheney to compare our brawl with al Qaeda to the American Civil War -- in today's numbers, 9 million casualties, and stemming from a rebellion that explicitly, Constitutionally sanctioned Lincoln's supra-executive maneuvers -- or the existential, apocalyptic World War threat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan is, at best, an immense crime against reason, intellect and proportionality.

Yet apparently there will remain an even bigger stain on America's honor than the unrepentant Dick Cheney and his presumed boss, George W. Bush. And that's the stain of Congressional do-nothingness, which only increases the odds that someday we and the world suffer their hideous likes again.