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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Dick Cheney's obsession with death
Posted by Jill | 6:53 AM
They don't call Dick Cheney the Dark Lord for nothing. Jeff Feldman has a fascinating post at Frameshop (cross-posted at HuffPo) that clearly underscores the Snarling Beast's relentless focus on death and killing:

Despite the timid coverage of Dick Cheney's recent speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee 2007 Policy Conference, America's violent-tongued Vice President gave a speech that all but accused the Democratic party of plotting to commit treason and kill American soldiers. Somehow, the thinly-veiled threats and violent vocabulary of Cheney's horror-soaked speech was missed by CNN when it described the Vice President as "chiding" Democrats.

Reading through Cheney's speech--posted to the White House web site for any journalist to read a full 5 hours before the CNN article appeared on their web site--I was able to quickly pull together the following list of words and the number of times they were repeated, all of which evoke violence and all of which were used by the Vice President in the span of 27 short minutes:


war - 31
terror - 26
enemy - 12
attack - 7
battle - 7
kill - 6
destroy - 4
bomb - 3
weapons - 2
death - 2
murder - 2
violence - 2


In this speech--where CNN claims the VP was only "chiding" Democrats--our NC-17 VP repeated the words "war," "terror,""enemy," "murder," "death" and "kill" enough times to make Quentin Tarantino cover his ears and switch over to the Animal Planet.

For goodness sakes. Cheney's speeches need a warning label: "**WARNING** The Vice President of the United States gives speeches peppered with violent vocabulary that may give you and your children nightmares for days."


More here or here.

It's enough to make you nostalgic for the days when Republican presidents would bust a union and then talk about a shining city on a hill, or gut programs for the poor and then talk about a thousand points of light. This administration is all about fear -- fear and death. For after all, a population that's convinced it's going to die at a moment's notice isn't going to care about how the Vice President and his business cronies are robbing their future.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has more on the Cheney mental pathology, noting how Dick Cheney and Osama bin Laden use the same kind of apocalyptic language:

Does Dick Cheney really believe that Osama bin Laden is going to rule over a "totalitarian empire" that subsumes all of Europe, the Middle East and even "the islands of Indonesia," destroy Israel, and impose their will on the world with their stockpiles of nuclear weapons? One can debate what's really in someone's mind only with speculation, but I think he probably has come to convince himself of that. There is no doubt that hordes of the hard-core Twenty-Three-Percenter followers have come to believe that. And our foreign policy, and large parts of the domestic behavior of our government, is absolutely predicated on that twisted worldview.

As always, the person whom Cheney quoted most heavily in his speeche yesterday is bin Laden, because they see world events in exactly the same apocolyptic terms.

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