by James Corbett
BoilingFrogsPost.com
March 27, 2012
Until last Saturday, those who called former Vice President Dick Cheney “heartless” would have been more or less technically correct. Since 2010, the now 71 year old with a history of heart troubles has been using a HeartMate II, a left ventricle assist device that helped his heart to pump blood to his organs. Unlike other technologies that seek to emulate the beating of the heart, the HeartMate uses a pump to create a continuous flow of blood through the circulatory system, meaning that patients, including Dick Cheney, have no pulse while using the device.
For someone who has long been likened to Darth Vader for his increasingly improbable medical longevity and his penchant for projecting an aura of evil and unconcern, the talking heads on both the left and right of the controlled political paradigm seem to have gone out of their way to avoid raising any of the issues surrounding the former Vice President or his time in office in their coverage of the incident.
What such gentle coverage obscures is that far from a respected and respectable public servant with whom some people on the other side of the aisle had some trifling political disagreements, Dick Cheney is in fact one of the world’s most reviled unindicted war criminals, a man who has consistently demonstrated a contempt for the electorate who put him into office, who has helped to engineer the current Department of Fatherland Security paradigm, who has paved the way for the rise of Blackwater and the privatization of the military, who has spearheaded the use of torture techniques as an acceptable practice by US forces, and who led the US into two separate illegal wars of aggression based on lies.
The Dick Cheney story started in January 1941, when Richard Bruce Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. Raised in Wyoming and a captain of his high school football team, Dick Cheney’s life of privilege got off to an early start when a family friend pulled some strings to get him into Yale. A lackluster and uninterested student, he managed to flunk out twice, then got arrested for drunk driving. When the country became embroiled in the Vietnam war, Cheney managed to dodge the draft every single year that he was eligible.
Cheney’s first project as a Republican congressional aide was to write a law that would allow the government to punish colleges that allowed anti-war protests.
He soon managed to team up with Donald Rumsfeld, who brought him into the White House in the 70s as Ford’s deputy chief of staff. Even after leaving the White House and becoming a congressman, Cheney was still at the heart of the American political apparatus.
His regard for the voting public during his time as an elected official was perhaps best summed up during some candid remarks at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group whose directorship he kept hidden from his constituency during his years in Washington.
Read the rest of this story at Corbett Report or Boiling Frogs