Dick Cheney, "Toy Soldier" on Memorial Day Parade

Lyndon Johnson's horrific war in Southeast Asia was still but a mere U.S. advisory mission when Dick Cheney became eligible for the draft. In fact, John Kennedy hadn't been elected president yet; even the swelling of our advisory ranks was yet to come.

So I can understand how Master Cheney, then 18 and a student at Yale, might have pondered that a first-class education was more important both to himself and his country than peeling potatoes as a buck private in some Louisiana swamp.

Dick however was still eminently eligible by the time Johnson's war was red hot -- by the time, that is, that many of his political ilk were deriding the quite untimely value of a college education and extolling military gung-hoism and patriotic duty -- but gosh darn-it Dick had decided he should remain in pursuit of "other" and presumably higher "priorities."

So by the time he reached non-draftable age, he had asked for and received five deferments. Others served -- and got their butts shot at -- in his place.

One of them was future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

So it is of somewhat sickening irony, as the New York Daily News' Mike Lupica points out on this Memorial Day, that the draft-dodging, torture-endorsing, war-instigating "toy soldier" likes of a Dick Cheney -- "whose idea of a foxhole is Fox News" -- should now be dictating what kind of a person bodies forth a patriotic Republican in good standing.

Cheney of course does, and Gen. Powell doesn't.

"[T]hat really is the current Republican Party, isn't it?" writes Lupica. "Angry old white men like Cheney and [Rush] Limbaugh talking to each other. Two toy soldiers who enjoy insulting a real one like Powell."

Do they really not "get it"? Or must they actively, consciously suppress throughout every waking moment such naked contradictions and extraordinary, party-sinking hypocrisy?

Comments

[Clem Snide]

Maybe Cheney is not only sadistic (we know that already, of course, plus supposedly his wife's book, _Sisters_, has a heroine with a real mean husband who likes to take sex by force!--true!)--but also masochistic as well--

Maybe it really turns him on to think of a crowd marching him to the gallows or guillotine! Gets him all stiff & bothered just thinking about it, so he keeps provoking us, hoping to goad us into his kinky game!

"Why haven't they hanged me yet, goddammit?! Little Dicky wants to go off in his trousers when his neck snaps & he reaches the end of his rope!"

Let's not play along---I say we just throw him in a maximum security cell for the rest of his wicked life, which probably isn't that much longer anyway seeing as his little mechanical Grinch heart could give out at any moment.