Let me start this diary off by getting the obvious out of the way: I do not wish death on Dick Cheney.
While I believe him to be one of the great war criminals of American history, and someone who's contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law to be shameful stains on the office of the Presidency and the government, I will not celebrate his death. Nor will I mourn him.
I will instead mourn for Dick Cheney's many failures. As a human being and as an American.
I will mourn for the many hundreds of thousands of victims of his politics and his hateful agenda.
But, most importantly, I will fight the inevitable Republican whitewash of the facts of who Dick Cheney was.
By now it should be obvious to everyone in the reality based world that the Republican Party is no longer functioning with any semblance of interest in real world facts or realities.
They are a party siezed by the very common cult-like impulse to create one's own reality out of a purely fictive, movie-like screenplay.
Ever since the horrifying realities of the corrupt Nixon shocked the party, and Ronald Reagan walked in out of central casting to rewrite reality using the tropes of the Hollywood movie star, the Republican Party has longed for Frank Capra fictions and for the harsh lights of the real world to be turned off in favor of the movie theater womb-like comfort of storytelling.
Enter the Right Wing Storytellers.
These performing clowns are in the classic folkloric tradition of campfire tales -- dancing on Fox News and on right wing radio spinning their yarns of fictions for their rapt audience.
They are the Sons of Reagan. The movie script peddling propagandists who can rewrite reality with easy verbal dexterity.
Not only can that wish away ugly facts like B.P. oil spills, years of Iraq War chaos, massive evidence of lies, fraud and torture by their President, but they can literally ignore a planet that's heating up in front of their eyes.
That's how powerful their Folkloric Storytellers are.
They can point at the sky and say "it's not raining!" and the true believers will get wet without seeing it.
They can snap their fingers on Fox News and "2+2=5!"
As Orwell observed, it is precisely in peddling the most ridiculously obvious lies that the fealty of the listener is tested and the loyalty is proven. The more absurd the lie, the more the loyalty is confirmed when the listener agrees.
This is how they can rewrite Ronald Reagan into a saint and impeach Bill Clinton over nothing remotely logically coherent.
The facts don't matter.
If anything, reversing the facts has the ultimate payoff -- it separates those who buy into the cult from those who still demonstrate critical thinking and therefore need to be expelled from the cult for heresy.
Enter Dick Cheney.
With increasing reports that his heart disease is entering very serious territory, Dick Cheney's time on earth may be limited. My warning, before he dies, is this:
At the moment Dick Cheney dies, the right wing media empire will engage in a massive and overwhelming historical rewrite of his legacy to contest the factual historical overview of a life that every notable death brings with it.
When a major political figure is alive, his legacy is still mobile and in flux. It is when that person dies that the "official story" starts to cement. And this is what terrifies the right wing propagnadists.
Because Dick Cheney's death will bring a recap of the lies that led us to invade Iraq. The "mushroom cloud" bullshit. The implications that Saddam Hussein was working with Al Qaeda and behind 9/11.
Nothing scares the right wing storytellers more than facts and evidence that would allow the masses to think for themselves. Theirs is a political movement built on irrational fear and reactionary hysteria.
The death of Dick Cheney will bring with it the first massive evaluation of the historical reality of the Bush/Cheney years. As such it will be a propaganda battle of epic proportions.
It once seemed impossible to believe the reputation of the vile Joseph McCarthy could ever be revived by the right wing. Yet, in the early 00s, just such an attempt was made.
The right wing propaganda formula works so:
- The masses are fools
- What the masses believe is usually wrong
- The Conservative Intellectual Elite are the real scholars who hold to the traditional conservative principles that allow America to prosper, in spite of the immigrant and ethnic masses who are lazy and just want to live off the welfare state.
- The masses, because they are the unwashed lower class heathens, will villify the very people who did the most for them (see Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" for this notion of elitsts being persecuted by the very people who benefit from their noble vision)
- Therefore conventional wisdom on major historical figures is usually wrong, because the "masses are asses."
This pseudo-intellectual contrarianism, laughable to any real scholar, is enough for fake "scholars" like Bill Kristol and George Will to peddle their historical rewrites.
And it is in this realm that the ugly, vile legacy of Dick Cheney, that has so stained this country with the blood of innocents, will attempt to be rewritten.
If we are not ready for this battle, we will simply be playing catch up when the right wing mouthpieces fire up the revisionism.
We must be prepared to counter this. To present Dick Cheney as he really was -- a historical figure that should find his reputation in eternal disgrace. A liar, a war monger, a torturer and a man who simply did not believe in the rule of law nor any semblance of basic human rights.
Dick Cheney's 2003 energy task force alone is likely what led to B.P. cutting corners in its drilling to "save money."
His warmed over notions of "free market uber alles" led to the raping and pillaging of American lands and our coastline.
His hiding of torture policy, one of the most eggregious crimes ever committed by an American political official.
His reputation deserves to be in the toilet of history.
We cannot let the right wing storytellers, who thrive on just such a historical rewrite, triumph in the moment of Dick Cheney's death.