Saint Ronny And The Big Dick

America In Retrograde

May 24, 2012

Saint Ronald of Reagan, patron saint of Republican’ts everywhere has a shiny image his followers love to caress…as often as possible…in public.  Blindly faithful disciples of Saint Ronald pretend he was what they need and want him to be.  They pretend he never raised taxes, which he in fact did, eleven times, including one of the largest tax increases in American history.  They pretend that he was pure and, with the exception of his two marriages and that chimp, chaste. 

They seem to forget that little kerfuffle where The Ronald sold arms to our mortal enemy Iran in order to flagrantly disregard the will of the American people, Congress, and a specially-passed law forbidding exactly the thing he broke the law by selling Iran weapons in order to do.  Those foolish enough to remember American history going back past yesterday will remember the Iran-Contra hearings as a moment in America’s past as shining and brilliant as the heady days of Watergate and the subsequent looming impeachment and actual resignation of the previous Republican’t president Richard Motherfucker Milhous Nixon.

Reagan believed, like Nixon before him, that the powers of the president were unlimited and above the law.  I suppose his copy of the Constitution might have been older than mine, so maybe I’m just being ignorant. In any event a report by Congress concluded, "If the president did not know what his national security advisers were doing, he should have."  Reagan's popularity declined from 67% to 46% in less than a week, the largest and quickest decline ever for a president.  The scandal resulted in fourteen indictments within Reagan's staff, and eleven convictions, a record which stands to this day.  Congress’ disdain for Reagan’s actions and his if-the-president-does-it-then-it-is-not-illegal-style defense reached deeply across the aisle, but not all the way.

There was a minority report, dissenting from the overwhelmingly bipartisan decision of Congress.  A lone voice in the wilderness cried out, an unknown, unassuming and clearly unfamiliar with the United States Constitution, Founding Fathers or the laws of our nation voice, but the solitary voice of a congressman nonetheless.  This unyielding and twisted soul insisted that if the president does it then it damn well is not illegal.  King Dick was someone who also did business illegally with Iran when it suited his purposes years later.  This little-known congressman later became known as Dick Cheney, lover of torture, proponent of starting illegal wars, outing inconvenient CIA operatives, a private military, a massive, illegal wiretapping program and secret governments running the country from secret undisclosed locations and confidential documents.  He did all this while blithely disregarding and disrespecting the civil rights of his lesbian daughter.  Cheney did manage to take a break from all this hard work to shoot a man in the face with a shotgun at close range.  It worked out okay though, the shooting victim ultimately apologized.

Cheney pretending to need a wheelchair to

avoid standing for the innauguation

of America's first black president



As a congressman Cheney voted against calling on the South African government to free Nelson Mandela from prison and against a federal holiday to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr.  During his time at the Defense Department the serial draft-dodger gave a private company a few million dollars to study the possibility of having a private company handle all the logistics for military operations abroad.  The idea was to have a private firm profit from military operations by overcharging and shortchanging our troops instead of having the military do the things it has always done, and as it turns out, done better.  The company Cheney hired to figure this out was called Halliburton, who looked into it, decided it was not only a good idea, but determined that they were the only company capable of carrying out such a task.  Mr. Cheney would later use this as a template when asked by George W. Bush to find him a running mate while Cheney was CEO of, you guessed it, Halliburton.  This is a guy who knows how to make capitalism larceny democracy work.

I wonder when the Republican’ts will officially canonize the Big Dick.  The process has already begun.  Multi-millionaire and fellow chicken hawk Willard Romney, who received four deferments from the Vietnam War he protested in favor of, recently asked about choosing a running mate said of Cheney, “I listened to him speak and said whether you agree or disagree with him, this is a man of wisdom and judgment, and he could have been president of the United States. That's the kind of person I’d like to have - a person of wisdom and judgment."  Maybe he should ask Cheney to help him find that running mate or to shoot an opponent in the face.  Or at the very least baptize Cheney as a Mor(m)on after he dies.

I. Mangrey reporting.

Thanks for listening. Responsible comment (and sainthood) invited.