Dr. J.'s Commentary: What Cheney is Really About

George W. Bush apparently really believes in the "alternate realities" that he presented to our nation and the world over and over again during his Presidency. Bush was a uniter, not a divider; Saddam really did have weapons of mass destruction (until it was absolutely proven otherwise); cutting taxes for the rich really would boost the economy; as president, he really did have all of those powers that Dick Cheney, Richard Addington, and John Yoo pretended to find for him in the Constitution; abolishing Social Security really would benefit everyone whose Social Security was thereby abolished as well as the country as a whole; he really did as president have the authority to say "I'll follow this Act of Congress but not that one, at my own discretion;" he could, on his own authority, abrogate treaties if his White House Legal Counsel thought they were "quaint;" Saddam really did buy "yellow cake" in Niger. And George Bush really is an undereducated, both ignorant and dumb, person. No, he was not a secret voracious reader, as "Turdblossom," otherwise known as Karl Rove, was so fond of telling us. There were never any references to such readings except on the occasions that such were written into speeches for him. But he probably thought that he was, given that Rove told the world he that was. That fit right into his alternate reality.

Dick Cheney is cut from an entirely different cloth. He is very knowledgeable, very smart, and knows exactly what he is doing every minute. He had a very clear agenda when he was in office: to run both the presidency and the president to the extent that he could. His ultimate objective was to establish an authoritarian state, something he called "The Unitary Presidency." Most not otherwise prejudiced observers, under the brief definition that follows, would call it "fascism":

"Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy."

Dick Cheney does not make off-hand remarks. Dick Cheney knows the truth from falsehood. Dick Cheney does not live in an alternate reality. Dick Cheney does try very hard to conceal the reality that he lives in. That is why during his vice presidency, he made very few public appearances where one or more members of the media could question him. However, he did make such an appearance this past Sunday on CNN.

There he uttered several palpable falsehoods. The claim that Iraq was a "state sponsor of terrorism" by implication related to 9/11. There was absolutely no proof to substantiate this claim, and Saddam went out of his way to avoid associating with terrorists such as Osama bin Laden (who happened to hate Saddam as a secularist) so as not to give the U.S. an excuse to attack him is beside the point.

Cheney stated that Democrats were responsible for the current economic crisis and that his administration and the Republican-led Congress controlled policy and monetary blank checks through 2006 had no responsibility, even though no one but the Republican Scream Machine holds to that view. He stated President Obama's policy of closing Guantanamo would make the U.S. "unsafe," when only a handful of the persons held there are known terrorists or potential terrorists. At the same time, it is now widely acknowledged that the Iraq War that Cheney largely ginned up has become, over the years, a major recruiting and training ground for potential terrorists.

So why did he offer these falsehoods? To score current political points? To indicate that he is now, post-position-of-power, falling into his political dotage and succumbing to the George W. Bush alternate reality disease? Certainly not. What Dick Cheney did was to make it very clear that his battle to establish an essentially fascist state in our country for the benefit of the primary power elements that he represents -- the extractive industries, the military/industrial complex, the prison/industrial complex, the major agribusinesses, and certain elements of the other major economic sectors -- is far from over. If the Cheney Wing of the Republican Party, now lead by Rush Limbaugh and his Republican Scream Machine clones, is ever to make it back to power, the first essential is to establish a mythology on which they can run. For they cannot possibly run on reality and hope to come close to winning.

The German Right in the 1920s did it with the "Stab in the Back" claim for the German loss of the World War I. Never mind that by 1918 Germany had been thoroughly bled of men, material, and money, that the U.S. was fully engaged on the British/French side, and that following the failure of the 1918 Summer Offensive under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, even the Kaiser was ready to quit. No. It was the "Socialists" and the "Communists" who "stabbed the German nation in the back." They did it. So "we," the patriotic Germans, have to get them. For it is all their fault.

And here, Cheney is marching down the same track. In collaboration with O'RHannibaugh and their clones, the Republican leadership in the Congress and outside of it (Gingrich) who see nowhere else to go, and their echo chambers, such as NewsMax (the voice of the American Conservative (sic) Union), the Fox "News" Channel, and the Heritage Foundation, he is laying the groundwork for their hopped-for GOP comeback, but this time with a vengeance. It's "The Liberals," dontchaknow, those traitors who, so Limbaugh and Coulter tell us, are responsible for everything that is wrong with the U.S., and "we" have to get "them," "squash them like cockroaches," so the self-parodying Mark Levin tells us.

Stay tuned. Indeed we all better stay tuned, because these people are serious when they say that they want Obama to fail. For that failure, combined with the mythology they are quickly developing, would very easily lead them back to power. And were that to happen, the GW Bush Presidency would be something that we would look back upon with longing.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and a www.TPJmagazine.us Contributing Author; a regular Columnist for BuzzFlash; a Special Contributing Editor for Cyrano's Journal Online; a Contributing Columnist for the Project for the Old American Century, POAC; and a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/.