In trying to peg the ruling Cheney-Bush Junta the term that comes to mind is Let's Make a Deal Democracy provided by a brigade of hypocritical Chicken Hawks.
Isn't it funny that this evil beast Saddam Hussein was not really such a bad fellow when we were in the midst of Operation Let's Make a Deal with him during the Reagan years? Even the coiner of the memorable term "Evil Empire" for the Soviet Union did not mind.
Our own CIA helped bring the Iraqi dictator to power in the first place and when deals were there to be made that we felt were in our interest then Donald Rumsfeld could sit there in Saddam's office and smile as the brutal dictator was gassing his own Kurdish population.
At one point Senator Allen Simpson of Wyoming, a close Dick Cheney home state compatriot and prominent Capitol Hill Republican, went to Baghdad and openly apologized to Saddam, lamenting that he had received a bad public relations rap from our presumably "left wing" media.
Mind you, however, that you have to shift gears fast with these guys. By the time that Bush I was ready to invade Iraq because he felt his Saudi Arabian friends were threatened, he lacerated our former ally that we helped to acquire poison gas through our largesse, and which he had used on his own population as well as Iranians, by calling him "worse than Hitler."
It's funny but that same George H.W. Bush was Vice-President to the Great Communicator himself when Operation Let's Make a Deal was in vogue. This is the same Bush that screeched at Dan Rather when the CBS reporter asked him about Iran-Contra, a deal that sent all kinds of dangerous weapons to the same Iran that we now find so dangerous.
Do you think some of Iran's hatred for the U.S. could stem from the poison gas unleashed on them in their war with Saddam that our technology helped supply?
Now we reach our current conflict in Iraq. Bush the Younger fretted about how terrible Saddam was and the imperative of getting rid of him before all of his presumed mass destruction weaponry was unleashed on us in the form of a "giant mushroom cloud."
Bush refused to let the UN complete its inspection and when it was learned that, as anticipated throughout the world community, that bully Saddam had been defanged by a combination of Gulf War devastation and sanctions, the response was "So what, we got rid of him, and he was a bad man!"
To justify removing Saddam Hussein Bush cited the parade of destruction and inhumanity that was carried out under the Reagan-Bush I watch, in which mainstays like Cheney and Rumsfeld participated.
Why not, when he knows that a media consisting of corporate shills on the one hand and supplicant Bush Liters on the other will not take him to task for this obvious and unjustifiable conduct and rationale.
Operation Let's Make a Deal reached its zenith when former Halliburton CEO Cheney, who continued collecting money from his former employer for doing its bidding from a more important arena, provided Halliburton with the infamous no bid contract and ensuing taxpayer billions to provide services in Iraq.
Halliburton would have some distinguished company as Bechtel, the multinational served by such prominent former Reagan cold warriors as George Schultz and Casper Weinberger, the latter from Iran-Contra days, along with Monsanto were also invited to join the lucrative cash payout scene in Iraq. Was this what Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld had in mind when they spoke about exporting American democracy to the Middle East?
Criticize any of this and the Dittoheads of Rush Limbaugh and zealots of Free Republic and News Max will call you a "traitor" bucking the tide of freedom being generated by their heroes.
These are the same ardent Cold Warriors and architects of freedom who rooted when Richard Nixon was bombing North Vietnam. They believed that the Viet Cong had to be exterminated before they, along with Asian Communist allies, stormed our shores and invaded San Francisco. Their citizens insisted that they needed no such protection, and presumably this has now become a moot point since Bill O'Reilly has stated that he no longer intends to visit the city by the bay.
This crowd talked tough, as they still do, but when it came time to back up their words with service commitment they all, as in the words of Cheney, had "other priorities." Karl Rove, then residing in Utah, expressed his hatred for the anti-war crowd that he felt was plaguing the leader he idolized, Richard M. Nixon, but begged off from serving.
Bill Kristol, then a Harvard student, expressed delight over Nixon's bombing of Cambodia but never sought to venture from the safety of Cambridge, Massachusetts to the jungle tundra of Southeast Asia. Richard Perle, that ardent anti-Communist honed in the Reagan Era, also felt content rooting from the sidelines in distant America.
This band of hypocritical Chicken Hawks prefer to send African Americans, Hispanics and other residents of poor urban and rural sections of America to fight wars for them while they collect profits. They wave an American flag they perpetually trash through their shabby conduct. The bribing Jack Abramoff and "on the take" Tom DeLay are classic examples of a cancer destroying America's vitals.