Cheney's Last Lap

You know how it is with things like hangnails, paper cuts, ingrown toenails... they get your attention when you have them, but about five minutes after they're gone you basically forget about them and go on with your life. You don't find too many people wandering around marveling that they don't have hangnails, in other words -- they are what are termed "dissatisfiers"; they "dissatisfy" when they're there, but the mere lack of them does not constitute a "satisfier" the way a good meal, for example, would.

And so it is with Dick Cheney. When he's around, snarling and griping from the sidelines and second-guessing Barack Obama and his administration, he's an irritant, and someone we wish would just get out of our lives and shut up. But when he's not around, we don't think about him a whole lot. Which brings us to the question, whatever happened to the Dickster? "Where is he now?" as they say. Because the things he was publicly griping about a few short weeks ago haven't obviously changed, and yet he has completely fallen off Sunday morning talking heads radar. The reason, I submit, is that his handlers in the power elite – those who are far above his pay and power grade – have told him to chill. They have determined – and rightly so – that their interests are not, after all, threatened in the least by Obama or by any of his policies... that we are as firmly entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan as we were under Bush... that we will continue to fight ceaseless wars on behalf of the elite... and that criticism of one their own by another one of their own is no longer helpful. It's basically the same thing as the sudden cooling of ardor when it came to the Bush/Cheney administration's “war crimes” -- it's time to move on, to let bygones be bygones, etc. Which is another way of admitting that, after all, we're ultimately all working for the same boss.

And so evidence continues to pile up that, aside from rhetoric and iconography, there really are no substantive differences between life under Bush/Cheney and life under Obama. Suspicions confirmed, I say again.

And in a related story, it seems that a dog owned by former French President Jacques Chirac has had to be sent off to some sort of doggie Alzheimer's ward because it started biting its owner (on the derriere, no less). And this, in turn, was because it became “depressed” after having to move out of the Elysee Palace. So... to add to all of Dick Cheney's other woes, now we have a clear opportunity to compare him to a Maltese lap dog. Lo, how the mighty have fallen...