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February 28, 2007

Satirist Says Cheney is Our Baghdad Bob

Bernard Weiner, satirist, has made a very astute observation: Dick Cheney has become our Baghdad Bob. You remember Bob – the Iraqi Information Minister who steadfastly insisted everything was great in Iraq while we were invading the country. When we heard Tony Blair was withdrawing a third of the British forces from Iraq, Cheney said it was a "sign of progress" and "an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well." As Weiner notes, "How could a satirist possibly top that one?"

Weiner notes a big difference between Baghdad Bob and Dick Cheney:

One could giggle at his lies because we all knew that he didn't believe what he was saying. He was spouting such nonsense because if he didn't toe Saddam's line, he'd be executed in a second. Besides, he had no power to affect events.

But Cheney has no such excuses: Along with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, Cheney is largely responsible for the policy that took the U.S. to war in Iraq, a policy based on outright lies, distortions, deceit. Cheney is the major progenitor of the war's current escalation of sending 21,000 more troops into Iraq. (This escalation comes nearly two years after Cheney, always consistent in his wrong-headedness, declared that the Iraq insurgency was "in its final throes." Baghdad Bob-ing again.)

I have to agree with Weiner that the comparison of Cheney to Baghdad Bob would be funny except for one thing: the game has cost several hundred thousand lives and countless more have been wounded. So why does it go on and on?

Normally, the political system in Washington would correct itself slowly over time, but that system appears to be so corrupted and frightened and confused that it will take a popular tsunami of desperate anger to get them to move and do the right thing. …

That's where you and I come in. We must not merely march and write letters and sign petitions and give money, as important and necessary as those acts are. But we also must get our hands dirty in the political trenches: run for office, volunteer to help good candidates, visit the offices of our elected representatives and senators and refuse to leave until they hear us out. We must initiate creative acts of civil disobedience that time and time again will get the word out that we love our country and will no longer tolerate its destruction and desecration from within and its reckless imperial adventuring abroad.

Of course we must. But I don't think we will. Not even with the prospect of nuclear war in the Middle East. Not even with the knowledge that our government is supporting al-Qauida linked Sunni terrorists working to put down Iranian Shiites.

Americans have been complaining for many years now about whatever it is that they put in the water in Washington that makes our elected officials lose touch with reality. In truth, I wonder if someone hasn't put a sleeping agent in the water supply of every American city. How else can you explain the fact that people simply will not step out of their comfort zone to protest what is going on? How else can you explain the fact that Baghdad Bob is orchestrating the fate of the world, and nobody seems to care?

Posted by Becky at February 28, 2007 10:07 AM