Cheney and the Dead Body of Osama
Monday January 15th 2007, 11:48 pm

Are you tired of Dick Cheney yet? He says the same thing over and over and the corporate media sucks it up through a straw. He drags out Osama bin Dead some six years now and Yahoo throws it up on the web.

“US Vice-President Dick Cheney accused critics of the administration’s new strategy in Iraq of playing into the hands of Osama bin Laden and global terrorism,” Yahoo News reports. It’s a fitting name for this sort of stuff, Yahoo News. News for the Yahoo masses. Back in the day, a Yahoo was one of a race of brutes, having the form and all the vices of humans, who are subject to the Houyhnhnms, a land imagined by Jonathan Swift where intelligent horses ruled.

Dick says the critics—that is to say, most of Yahoodom, when they bother to raise their heads—”are convinced that the current debate in the Congress, that the election campaign last fall, all of that is evidence that they’re right when they say the United States doesn’t have the stomach for the fight in this war against terror.”

Naturally, most people haven’t the faintest idea what’s going down in Congress. I mean, like, who cares? Booooring.

Never mind history. Somebody point Dick to the Algerian War of Independence. France tried damn hard to defeat the maquisards, but you can’t fight a people determined to realize self-determination to the death, that is not without wiping them off the map.

Can do, Dick and the neocons promise, thus we get incessant talk about nukes and bunkers, next to no straight talk about tenement blocks collapsing on babies, radiation sickness, flaming oil tankers, or World War Three, Four—pick your flavor, it will all be horrific, not that we have time to notice, not with Salma Hayek dating Penelope Cruz.

As for news on the Iraq front, we get Michelle Manhart, a tart “relieved of her duties” as an Air Force staff sergeant for posing nude in Playboy. For the more adventurous out there, we have the grisly spectacle of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, half brother of Saddam, hung high until his head popped off. Mr. al-Tikriti ran the brutal Mukhabarat intelligence service. Lost in the shuffle is the fact the CIA worked closely with the Mukhabarat in 1963, providing them with lists of “leftists and communists” to be rounded up, tortured, and killed.

“Bin Laden doesn’t think he can beat us. He believes he can force us to quit,” Cheney continued. “He believes after Lebanon and Somalia, the United States doesn’t have the stomach for a long war and Iraq is the current central battlefield in that war, and it’s essential we win there and we will win there…. They’re convinced that the United States will, in fact, pack it in and go home if they just kill enough of us.”

Osama is sort of like Coca Cola or iPod—everybody knows who he is, the guy has brand recognition, never mind posthumously.

As for killing “enough of us,” Dick wasn’t talking about his clan, or his office buddies, mostly chicken hawks. He was talking about “dumb, stupid animals,” as Kissinger called “our troops,” kids from North Carolina, Texas, Nebraska, Chicago’s Southside. No chance Cheney and crew will “pack it in and go home” until a few hundred thousand more Iraqis die—and an as of yet undetermined number of Iranians—and three or four thousand more “stupid animals,” garden variety “pawns for foreign policy.” As well, more heads need to be ripped off. “Hangmen gauge the length of rope required according the weight of the condemned—it should be long enough to ensure the neck is snapped but not so long that the force decapitates the convict,” the Mail & Guardian informs us.

While appearing on 60 Minutes, Bush “sought, in slightly different ways, to intimidate the majority of Americans who oppose the continuation of the US occupation of Iraq and want a rapid withdrawal of all American troops,” according to the World Socialist Web Site.

I remain unconvinced about this intimidation factor. Let’s face it, most Americans are oblivious, distracted, are seriously unconcerned, that is unless one of their own faces another “tour of duty.” In order to be intimidated, you have to be awake and paying attention, say to the degree a lot of people pay attention to O.J.’s blackout and coming “to with a bloody knife in his hands and the bodies of Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman, lying on the floor.” Now that sells newspapers at the chain grocery store checkout line.

However, more Americans may pay attention on the day oil shoots up to two or three hundred dollars a barrel as a result of well-aimed Sunburn missiles taking out oil tankers and closing down the Persian Gulf. Five or six dollars a gallon for unleaded has a way of getting your attention, especially if you drive fifty or sixty miles to reach that office cubicle. Of course, it won’t simply be the price at the pump, but the price of heating oil, food, and just about everything else connected to our wonderful “oil economy.”