If you want to understand how America’s moral high ground was squandered look no further than the Dick Cheney celebrity roast. This disgusting soiree according to accounts took place earlier this week and is a profound indictment of the imperial rot that has dragged our once great country to the brink of collapse. I am sad to say that this story is not soemthing out of The Onion, The Borowitz Report or some other satirical website – it is the truth and it is as dark as the proverbial black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night. In this country we now honor war criminals, the more sadistic and contemptuous towards the principles embodied in the Constitution the more celebrated that they become. Look at Cheney who is treated as a precious elder statesman despite his instrumental role in transforming the United States which we live in and once had legitimate reason to be proud of into a global pariah, a torture state and one with a failed government and the fascist infrastructure to go along with it.
According to the story by Ben Smith at Buzzfeed:
Conservatives gathered at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan Monday night to roast the former vice president at an event where many of the biggest laugh lines touched on the most controversial policies of a key architect of his administration’s war on terror. At the gathering, hosted by Commentary, figures including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey drew a mix of chuckles and winces with jokes that left few lines uncrossed, according to three guests.
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman “said something to the effect that it’s nice that we’re all here at the Plaza instead of in cages after some war crimes trial,” recalled one person who was there.
In a decent society Lieberman and the rest of his warmongering, above the law miscreants would be occupying 6 x 6 cages at Gitmo, that is if this country were to have any respect for justice. The Cuban concentration camp would have to undergo a massive expansion if it was transformed from an establishment serving legal limbo for those who cannot be brought to legitimate trial as their testimony was compelled by the torture that the filth at the Cheney event stamped their own “MADE IN AMERICA” trademark upon. Dick Cheney certainly does not belong on the dais at some tony Manhattan locale but rather in the dock at the Hague and those who showed up to honor this most disgraceful of all of American political figures are complicit in the man’s crimes.
One unnamed guest was quoted in this story for the Atlantic Wire as expressing disgust at the swinish gathering and all of its moral debauchery:
"I can see the case for enhanced interrogation techniques after Sept. 11 but I can’t really endorse sitting there drinking wine and fancy dinner at the Plaza laughing uproariously about it," an attendee told Smith. The crowd watched a video (which perhaps needs more explanation) that put Cheney's head on other people's bodies. Podhoretz said he would release it for $1 million.
Some people have a seriously sick sense of humor that is especially manifested in the circle of psychopaths and sycophants that a “man” like Dick Cheney attracts like horseflies circling a rotting dog carcass. It was during the reign of Cheney that one of the most disgusting exchanges in modern American history took place when former Bush administration legal fixer John Yoo admitted during a 2006 debate that the president had the legal grounding to crush a child's testicles:.
It has now come out Yoo also had a hand in providing legal reasoning for the President to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole wrote, "Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush’s legal policies in the 'war on terror’ than John Yoo."
This part of the exchange during the debate with Doug Cassel, reveals the logic of Yoo’s theories, adopted by the Administration as bedrock principles, in the real world.
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
John Yoo was rewarded for his legal justifications of the monstrous torture policies of the Bush-Cheney regime with a professorship of law at the University of California at Berkeley. Many other architects of the moral abandoning of America during Cheney’s torture fest have also been rewarded. Book deals, think tank appointments, cable news celebrities and perverted examples of respectable statesmen, it pays to have influential friends. The grotesque affair of Monday night is a pox upon our national dignity, whatever scant remnants of it are left after Cheney and his ilk rode roughshod over two and a quarter centuries of democracy and abdicated the moral high ground that was paid for by the blood of our better generations who sacrificed all fighting the same type of ideologies that were exalted during the Cheney roast in that exclusive setting on Monday.
The only place that Richard B. Cheney should be roasted is on a spit in the bowels of Hades and the sooner that he gets there the better that this country will be.
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