One school of thought dismisses Obama as a traitor who has turned the Land of the Great to mush.
When Barack Obama won the Nobel peace prize, he offended a number of people. And a number of schools of thought mushroomed all over the place opining on the Obama Nobel.
I will not try to enumerate all the diverse schools of thought on the subject. Suffice it to confine myself to two: those who argued that, even though Obama was a breath of fresh air in the stuffy closet of US politics, the medal had been conferred prematurely. There was no rancour here, just a concern that the prize would put undue pressure on a president who was still a virgin in the school of hard knocks - international diplomacy.
The concern, I surmised, was that the prize would distract him, or inspire him to rest on his easily earned laurels instead of rolling up his sleeves to redeem the image of his country, and to take the leadership mantle in some of the major challenges facing the world today: poverty, extremist ideology, disease and climate change. (For more on these challenges, read Bono's article on Page 11 of Review).
But there was another contingent whose criticism was very bizarre - born of jealousy, anger and misdirected, if not irrational, disappointment. This school of thought dismisses Obama as a traitor who has turned the Land of the Great to mush.
This school of thought is led by Liz Cheney, who is still screaming like a banshee how her dad, the great straight-shooting Dick Cheney, actually "liberated" Iraq. When Obama received the great honour, Sis Liz was reported to have suggested that Obama "send the mother of a fallen American soldier to accept the prize on behalf of the US military".
Implied in that statement is that Obama actually sent US troops to Iraq in the first place. Or that the US earned the Nobel prize for invading Iraq.
What a poor, sad and arrogant way of rewriting history. Sis Liz is insulting the intelligence of those of us who haven't forgotten that it was at the behest of Dick Cheney that ole George W Bush started blabbering about weapons of mass destruction - a precursor to, if not justification for, a full-scale invasion of Iraq.
Cheney was quoted in the press, on August 26 2002, as having said: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
It was PJ O'Rourke who, having visited the presidential palace in Baghdad, concluded that the US attack on Iraq was justified for at least one reason: criminal interior decorating.
That barb is understandable coming from the court jester of the Republican Party. But what was Cheney's excuse? Oh, yes, that little matter of the US needing some measure of control, even if indirectly, of oil reserves in neighbouring Kuwait, and also the fact that Cheney had a spineless, malleable mush-brained president in Bush. Needless to say, the weapons of mass destruction were never found. But this did not stop the US from sustaining its presence there. Even after killing Saddam, it stayed put in Iraq.
Cheney, reputed to be the most powerful vice-president in the history of the US, has had a hand in US invasions in countries as diverse as Panama (where the US got rid of General Manuel Antonio Noriega), Bosnia and Somalia (which culminated in the near humiliation of US troops there as immortalised in the movie Black Hawk Down).
On February 11 2006, Cheney was hunting quail with friends and acquaintances when he shot Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney who was part of the hunt. Whittington didn't die, but suffered a mild heart attack. The incident was dismissed as an accident.
Some fun was had at Cheney's expense after this. David Letterman opened his show with a triumphant announcement: "Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located a weapon of mass destruction ... It's Dick Cheney." He added: "We can't get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney."
And, now, with Obama having just won the Nobel, another Cheney daughter, Mary, who is expecting her second child with her partner Heather Poe, has announced that she is starting a consulting firm that concentrates on image making - a firm that will give high-profile personalities in business and politics strategic advice on how to make things look totally the opposite of what they really are.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reports that Mary will enlist the services of her elder sister Liz and her father in this regard. No surprises there.
Dowd writes: "You can hear a receptionist chirping: 'Cheney, Cheney & Cheney. Who would you like to target today?'"
For now it seems the Cheney, Cheney & Cheney guns are trained at Obama and Co.
Hey, Mugabe, who is not in Obama's good books, might phone Cheney, Cheney & Cheney and ask them for an image makeover so that countries in the West can better understand his brand of democracy and power sharing.
And then there's President Mamadou Tandja, of Niger, who has just changed his country's constitution allowing him to remove term limits to his reign. Now there's a dictator in need of a quick makeover. Brother Tandja, call Cheney, Cheney & Cheney. They might just be the dictator-friendly contacts you want when the uncivilised leaders of neighbouring Nigeria suggest you vacate the seat bestowed upon you by the gods.
Cheney is very close to royalty in Saudi Arabia, and not so friendly to neighbouring Iran. There must be business somewhere in this for his daughter's image-making firm. How about dressing the Saudis in new clothes? How about intensifying calls for a war with Iran? Although his influence has waned in the White House, Cheney still commands a lot of respect in the business sector, and that matters a lot in US politics. Cheney might be out of the White House, but indications are that the man who had his tentacles in such enterprises as Halliburton, Enron and many other powerful ones is not out of the big picture where power, influence and connectedness matters most.
As the Washington Post put it bluntly: "The Cheneys have, of course, found time to become something of their own brand - a highly bookable, consistently gruff clan who speak in dour unison when bashing the current president, second-guessing the previous commander-in-chief and chiding (Republican Party) leaders."
Oh, brother Obama, thank God I'm not in your shoes. You need more than a bulletproof vest, for Cheney's got a gun/Cheney's got a gun/His dog day's just begun/Now everybody is on the run/Tell him now it's untrue/What did his daughter do? (with apologies to Aerosmith).
Loading...
Keto