As President Barack Obama continues his inspired work to change the world, the media--always over caffeinated and seriously breathless--is without a vocabulary, and more profoundly without a worldview capable of conceptualizing the sparkling new reality that is unfolding in front of them. Determined to validate the cliché that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, they roll out a corpse rotting from moribund ideas to comment on what it means to be alive.
And there stands Dick Cheney, resplendent in his smug ignorance, an avuncular Dr. Strangelove is what he is made out to be. He is speaking about how the dismantling of the web of torture and other law breaking activities, have left this country open to new attacks. No one reminds the former VP that it was on their watch that 9/11 occurred and that they were determined to ignore information about an impending attack—information that if acted on may have spared the world the convulsive pain in now endures.
Why does anyone listen to this man when he has been wrong about everything, even about being wrong he is wrong: when asked if in light of all that has been wrong about regarding Iraq would do anything differently he proclaims that he would not. This is the strange world in which Cheney has apparently always lived.
The real question is why does the media treat his statements seriously. In most neighborhoods in which I have lived, the response to Cheney would be something like “Negro, please.” Or, indeed, as then President elect Obama said famously during his speech in Denver, “Enough.” And this was the clarion call of an adult to a bunch of grown-ass children pretending to be adults—and we are of course reaping the world wind of madness they so systematically rained down on the planet.
It’s time to let the Zombie sleep, and if he occasionally stumbles out of the grave of irrelevance he should helped back to that spot and not given a podium from which to assert that death is life. Let the Zombie sleep.
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