Today’s film is “Vice,” a film that rips apart Dick Cheney. We might ask why something like this is important, are we apologizing for America’s rampage around the world killing millions, using psychopath Cheney as an excuse? Are we warning the world that if there could be a “real Dick Cheney” so much worse than the one the liberal press pushed down our throats, what else is being hidden?
Sources on the underground power structure of Washington still place Chaney as probable “Command in Chief” of the Deep State shadow government. Pentagon experts like VT’s Colonel Jim Hanke have long warned that Cheney’s hijacking of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) had allowed the neocons to run military operations “off the books” well into Obama’s presidency and perhaps even into Trump’s.
The real mistake in evaluating Cheney was in taking the attacks on him by the liberal press seriously. Whether laziness, incompetence or being bought off, the “real” Dick Cheney, a half-wit dullard that oozes malevolence, the one from the film, is totally unrelated from the angry “sharp witted” Cheney depicted for his enemies, which is pretty much everyone alive.
Cheney may well have been or well may still be the most powerful leader in America’s history, a history that is rocked with failure upon failure, an end to American power, an end to American honor, such as it is or was, an America whose cohesion at home and reputation around the world may well be irreparable.
According to his Wikipedia, former Vice President Dick Cheney “attended Yale.” According to the biographical film, “Vice,” Cheney went to Yale for one term, was thrown out for failing grades and alcoholism. His “academic deferments” that kept him out of Vietnam were really “hardship deferments,” as Cheney, then the “town drunk” of a Montana backwater, was unable to support his young family.
Washington has always been filled with fakes of one kind or another, and the film, Vice, perhaps the most controversial and most popular expose’ of the real Washington thus far, lays bare exactly the kind of thing we have all imagined, that Trump’s claims of Washington being a “swamp,” were understatements.
Considering Trump comes from New York, a city famous for bad manners, filth and street crime, his reaction to Washington is telling.
Washington has never been much, built on a swamp, big buildings to impress, filled with small men mostly, when someone else shows up, they are quickly gunned down. In 1939, Hollywood director Frank Capra directed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film lauded for demonstrating the “evil of political indifference” as reviewer David Parkinson of Empire is quoted.
Today we have another, a film far greater, no fiction needed here. The name is short, four letters, V-I-C-E, the story of Vice President Dick Cheney, produced by Adam McKay, a comedy writer for Saturday Night Live, and starring Christian Bale.
Let’s reword that, “Starring Christian Bale as former town drunk Dick Cheney, a draft dodger and bum who latched onto narcissist and psychotic, Donald Rumsfeld during the darkest years of the Nixon regime and this pair of useless “behind kissers” wormed their way into the corridors of power.
Cheney and Rumsfeld had little in common other than being on the spectrum of psychopathy, something not uncommon in Washington, not hardly. Cheney was functionally illiterate, tossed out of Yale, the town drunk and “jailbird” of a Montana backwater while Rumsfeld had been a peacetime Navy pilot and polished manipulator.
Where the chemistry goes so awry is when Cheney, and the year is 2000, meets another loser, draft dodger and former town drunk, also often in jail, named George W. Bush. As the film depicts, Bush agrees to turn all presidential power over to Cheney, perhaps one of the least qualified vice-presidential candidates in history.
The film, in its heavy handedness, its brutal depictions is, if anything an understatement though few if any other than those who have worked in Washington could possibly imagine it.
There is a process some call “normalization,” wherein the worst possible human beings, when placed in the public eye, bumbling fools, criminal sociopaths, simply wear out the public’s ability to deal with disaster and insanity. This the film explains quite well, how a nation whose population has been spiraling into poverty since the Reagan debacle, would simply rather turn away rather than notice that its leaders were simple minded losers with a history of failures, addictions and abusive rage.
Whether we are talking about Donald Trump’s well documented and oft denied addiction to the amphetamine Adderall (called “Smurf diving” as snorting Adderall leaves blue stains under the nose caused by the dye used to coat the tablets that have to be crushed), or Cheney’s love of cheap whisky or George W Bush’s cocaine and vodka, the story is clear, the weaker the man, the more meteoric the rise in Washington.
So, what did Cheney get us? Note the wars going on now, troops in Iraq, bombings in Yemen, secret drones strikes across Africa, Syria occupied, a nation conditioned to accept contrived threats as real.
Behind it has been the looting of America at the hands of fake elites that have enriched themselves by sending jobs overseas, paying no taxes and engineering decades of phony wars against non-existent or contrived enemies like al Qaeda and ISIS, little more than CIA mercenaries with crisis actor leaders thrown in for “color.”
From Edward Wolf, Professor of Economics at NYU:
The median net worth of middle class households has dropped by a whopping 44% since 2007 and has not recovered after the worst was over in 2010. The median household today is 6% poorer than their parents were in 1969.
Behind it is the work of Dick Cheney, the total collapse of American banking and industry in 2007-8. Average American families lost their savings, up to 35% lost their homes, unemployment nationally hit 11%, typical of 3rd world nations with savings and retirement accounts not just disappearing but replaced with negative balances.
Past this, the soaring national debt at $5 trillion when Clinton left office doubled during the Cheney presidency, and we have to call it that. Moreover, it cost another $10 trillion to buy America’s economy out of the banking collapse illiterate Cheney engineered.
It’s hard to imagine that a nearly invisible little fat guy with a sub-normal intelligence quotient could spend 8 years on endless vacations and hunting trips where his hosts, America’s wealthy, cut private deals to eliminate their taxes, loot America’s treasury and eventually drive a generation of Americans into poverty.
How can a film be this important? This is the issue of “normalization.” Cheney had been depicted as an oil executive. In truth, Cheney, alleged architect with Donald Rumsfeld, of the Saddam invasion of Kuwait and later US response (Desert Storm), had pushed endless billions in no-bid contracts to Haliburton Corporation to rebuild the oil fields of Kuwait destroyed in what can only be described as the fake and theatrical farce of Desert Storm.
This, of course, as with other claims made in the film, might well be fiction except that it isn’t. In an article from Veterans Today dated January 31, 2011, a bizarre occurrence is outlined. Congressman Ron Paul cites the following before the US House of Representatives:
“[Congressional Record: January 26, 2011 (House)] [Page H503]
“The SPEAKER pro tempore.
Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, how did the 20-year war get started?
It had been long assumed that the United States Government, shortly before Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, gave Saddam Hussein a green light to attack. A State Department cable recently published by WikiLeaks confirmed that U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie did indeed have a conversation with Saddam Hussein one week prior to Iraq’s August 1, 1990, invasion of Kuwait.”
The text of that cable is telling, a broad indictment of US policy, written in highly diplomatic and literate terms by a Saddam Hussein very different from the one damned in the US press. The summary of that cable submitted to Secretary of State James Baker, unedited, is below:
Reference ID Created Released Classification Origin 90BAGHDAD4237
FM AMEMBASSY BAGHDAD
TO SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 4627
INFO AMEMBASSY ABU DHABI IMMEDIATE
AMEMBASSY CAIRO IMMEDIATE
AMEMBASSY KUWAIT IMMEDIATE
AMEMBASSY RIYADH IMMEDIATE
ARABLEAGUE COLLECTIVE
S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 05 BAGHDAD 04237
SUBJECT: SADDAM’S MESSAGE OF FRIENDSHIP TO PRESIDENT BUSH
SECRET – ENTIRE TEXT.
SUMMARY: SADDAM TOLD THE AMBASSADOR JULY 25
THAT MUBARAK HAS ARRANGED FOR KUWAITI AND IRAQI
DELEGATIONS TO MEET IN RIYADH, AND THEN ON
JULY 28, 29 OR 30, THE KUWAITI CROWN PRINCE WILL
COME TO BAGHDAD FOR SERIOUS NEGOTIATIONS. “NOTHING
WILL HAPPEN” BEFORE THEN, SADDAM HAD PROMISED
MUBARAK.
–SADDAM WISHED TO CONVEY AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO
PRESIDENT BUSH: IRAQ WANTS FRIENDSHIP, BUT DOES
THE USG? IRAQ SUFFERED 100,000’S OF CASUALTIES
AND IS NOW SO POOR THAT WAR ORPHAN PENSIONS WILL
SOON BE CUT; YET RICH KUWAIT WILL NOT EVEN ACCEPT
OPEC DISCIPLINE. IRAQ IS SICK OF WAR, BUT KUWAIT
HAS IGNORED DIPLOMACY. USG MANEUVERS WITH THE UAE
WILL ENCOURAGE THE UAE AND KUWAIT TO IGNORE
CONVENTIONAL DIPLOMACY. IF IRAQ IS PUBLICLY
HUMILIATED BY THE USG, IT WILL HAVE NO CHOICE
BUT TO “RESPOND,” HOWEVER ILLOGICAL AND SELF
DESTRUCTIVE THAT WOULD PROVE.
–ALTHOUGH NOT QUITE EXPLICIT, SADDAM’S MESSAGE
TO US SEEMED TO BE THAT HE WILL MAKE A MAJOR PUSH
TO COOPERATE WITH MUBARAK’S DIPLOMACY, BUT WE MUST
TRY TO UNDERSTAND KUWAITI/UAE “SELFISHNESS” IS
UNBEARABLE. AMBASSADOR MADE CLEAR THAT WE CAN
NEVER EXCUSE SETTLEMENT OF DISPUTES BY OTHER THAN
PEACEFUL MEANS. END SUMMARY.”
This was the war that built Halliburton Corporation and made Dick Cheney an “oil executive” who made tens of millions in war after war as Halliburton became prime contractor supplying food, water and mercenaries for wars now shown to have been contrived and faked, with investigation quelled and the truth, as with this State Department cable above, cleaned from the records, erased, suppressed and forgotten.
You know, it isn’t just Cheney. Fakery and coverups is an industry in Washington. The nation’s most powerful law firms have been contracted for such valuable tasks as protecting Trump’s wife and her family from charges of immigration fraud or to suppress stories of her alleged history in unseemly professions.
There are two primary industries in Washington, covering up who people really are, and faking who they want people to believe they are.
Oh, there’s a third as well, smearing anyone who strays from the “righteous path.” Google any name, even mine, perhaps especially mine, and guess how much cash has been spent on Google “sponsored” content.
American politics has always been a home for losers and underachievers. Of our recent presidents, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush 43 and Trump are reputed to be of less than normal intelligence. The glorification of Reagan is especially painful, massive financial deficits, record homelessness, collapsing education system, failed military programs (Star Wars and others) with trillions lost or stolen, 30,000 closed savings and loans, and industry after industry moved overseas.
Beyond that, 47 White House officials including cabinet members convicted of felonies as America officially went into the narcotics business, loading cities with crack cocaine. From the UK Telegraph, March 21, 2015 on journalist Gary Webb:
“Gary Webb knew his story would cause a stir. The newspaper report he’d written suggested that a US-backed rebel army in Latin America was supplying the drugs responsible for blighting some of Los Angeles’s poorest neighbourhoods – and, crucially, that the CIA must have known about it.
Dark Alliance was a series written by California-based reporter Webb and published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. In it, he claimed the Contra rebels in Nicaragua were shipping cocaine into the US. which was then flooding Compton and South-Central Los Angeles in the mid-Eighties after being turned into crack – a relatively new and highly addictive substance sold in ‘rocks’ that could be smoked. Webb also said the CIA was aware that proceeds from the sales of those drugs were being funneled back to help fund the Contras.
Dark Alliance has been called one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism and was the first investigative story to “go viral”. Webb didn’t anticipate some of this, but he wasn’t prepared for the level of uproar it would cause in LA’s black communities, incredulous that their own government could in some way be responsible for the crack epidemic plaguing their homes; that it would force the US government on the PR defensive; that the mainstream press, scooped by a tiny upstart, would attack Webb rather than try to dig deeper into the scandal they uncovered; or that the fallout would eventually lead to Webb taking his own life.
Nineteen years on, the story of Webb’s investigation and its aftermath has been given the full Hollywood treatment. Kill the Messenger, based on his account of what happened and a book of the same name about the saga by journalist Nick Schou was recently released in cinemas. And with it, some believe, came the full vindication that Webb deserves.”
We still pretend that Reagan’s “Iran Contra” wasn’t about drug money and arms smuggling, in fact, America’s biggest political scandal, one that would have put Ronald Reagan in prison were he not suffering from advanced dementia.
No such investigations will ever target Cheney. America has dropped out of every treaty and legal convention over the past few decades.
The same Washington that Trump rules over, the same whining press, the same blank eyed congress, the same goose-stepping behind kissers that filled the Pentagon then, nothing has changed. Whatever Trump has done or will do, he will never reach the depths of Cheney, millions dead, $10 trillion spent, wasted or stolen and that nor will he be subject of that other question; “Is Dick Cheney the devil?”
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”