The most painful part to watch was Cheney, early on, dispassionately talking about "the dark side" – Gitmo, torture, suspension of Habeus Corpus, ignoring Congress, ignoring the Geneva Conventions. David Addinton, Alberto Gonzales, and John Yoo could be disbarred for going along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, maybe even pushing things along. They came out swinging with these policies, and ratcheted them up until exposed at Abu Ghraib. These crazy Narcissistic men interpreted the fact that they couldn’t get the Intelligence they wanted as a call to hurt the captives more, rather than accept that what they wanted wasn’t there to be gotten.
I’ve always had trouble with Cheney. He speaks so difinitively, so confidently, that I have had difficulty believing that he is as incompetent as his President, George. But this special sealed his fate with me. Dick Cheney knows how to amass and consolidate power. He doesn’t know what to do with it, how to use it. I saw not one single instance where either he or Donald Rumsfeld was persuaded to change their minds during the documentary that covered this five year war. I saw glimpses where our boy President saw some of our problems with clarity, but I saw no instance where that clarity got put into action. When the prewar intelligence was presented, he said, "Is that it?" George Tennant said, "It’s a slam dunk." George went with that. It was hardly a slam dunk, and the "it" they had was all lies.
And to reiterate my point of the last several days, for Karl Rove to say as he did on O’Reilly, "… the creation of the democracy in the historic center of the Middle East with the third-largest oil reserves in the world. If we have a functioning democracy in Iraq, that’s an ally in the war on terror, a counterweight to the mullahs of Iran and to Assad in Syria, this will create a very hopeful center of reform and energy for reform throughout the Middle East" adds insult to injury. Six and a half years ago, George W. Bush had an opportunity for a moment of greatness – after 911. We’d have supported him, even we "Liberals." Instead, he chose to follow the lead of two paranoid men who had been together for thirty plus years, who had Nixonian arrogance, Reagan-esque naivity, and the Consciences of Donald Segretti and Gordon Liddy. They had escaped detection in the past, and finally reached a level of power where they could do irreparable harm. And that’s what they did.
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