“Chicken Hawks”

The Contrast Of Dick Cheney And Joe Biden

Ronald Leave a comment

The last two Vice Presidents of the United States are a study in massive contrasts!

Both Dick Cheney and Joe Biden were qualified to become a heartbeat away from the Presidency when they took office.

Both Dick Cheney and Joe Biden displayed basic competency in their roles as Vice President. They were not Dan Quayle, for instance, or a similar situation if Sarah Palin had ever become Vice President!

Both Dick Cheney and Joe Biden are highly intelligent and, in many ways, were more ready to become President, based on their experience, than their “bosses”, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

But that is the extent of how Dick Cheney and Joe Biden are to be compared positively!

Dick Cheney has proved to be the most controversial former Vice President in modern history, far surpassing the outspokenness of John C. Calhoun, after serving under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s, and Henry A. Wallace, after serving under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1940s!

Neither Calhoun nor Wallace nor any other former Vice President has ever continued to be the subject of so much attention, all of it showing Cheney constantly on the attack against President Obama, and using the psychological idea of “transference” to blame Obama for all of the faults of the Bush-Cheney Administration over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!

Cheney and his daughter Liz are clearly out to destroy Barack Obama’s ability to govern, and Cheney’s neoconservative viewpoint is being repudiated by the American people, but the Cheneys are tone deaf!

The fact that Cheney was a “chicken hawk”, who avoided military service in the 1960s, but is only too willing to use military force everywhere in the world without limits, and that he has enriched himself through his connections with Halliburton, one of the major war profits corporations, and does not apologize one iota for it, is both hypocritical and infuriating, as Cheney has no shame!

The man is seen by many as a war criminal, who was totally wrong in his assessment of the Iraq War, but will not apologize for it, and refuses to go into the woodwork. He is defiant in every way possible, and sees no contradictions in his statements and the truth, as even Megyn Kelly of Fox News Channel pointed out to him this week, as Cheney advocates a military intervention back into Iraq!

One would think that Cheney would go off into the sunset and shut his mouth, but just the opposite is occurring, and his daughter Liz is determined, despite her withdrawal from the Wyoming Senate race this year, to be a factor, and an inheritor of her father’s ideas and principles, whatever they might seem to be to others!

Dick Cheney also comes across as forbidding in personality, unpleasant, arrogant, harsh, and in fact so much so, that even his “boss”, George W. Bush, started to back away from contact with him in the second term.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden has been very supportive of Barack Obama all the way, and has shown his winning personality and his sincerity and genuine nature, and is now being shown to have been correct in his assessment years ago that the best solution for the Iraq mess is a division into three nations, each based on ethnic lines, not all that different than the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s into separate nations.

Joe Biden has been, in so many ways, a positive force in the Vice Presidency, while Dick Cheney will, in the long run, as well as already in the short run, be seen as a negative force!

The Neocons: Despicable Hypocrites!

Ronald 3 Comments

The Neoncons, those conservatives and Republicans who drew us into the Iraq War on false intelligence, are at it again, advocating further intervention in a hopeless war, in a nation which should, and likely, will be, soon, three nations instead of one, as the concept of Iraq created by Great Britain and France after World War I, has been a total failure, accelerated by the US intervention in 2003!

The nerve and gall of the neocons–mostly “Chicken Hawks” who never served in the military–to advocate return to Iraq, and to blame the mess there on Barack Obama, rather than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, is beyond belief!

To see Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Kark Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, and so many other hypocrites, all liars and deceivers, advocate the same failed policies, is enough to make one vomit!

To see John McCain and Lindsey Graham call for more military intervention, despite their military service, is also hard to conceptualize, and makes one happy McCain was not elected President in 2008!

Somehow, particularly annoying, is Bill Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard, with that classic smirk on his face, calling for more intervention everywhere, despite the fact that everything he has ever stated and advocated, has proven to be totally wrong! One would love to meet Kristol, and put him on the defensive, and really, wipe that smirk off his cocky, arrogant face!

These people listed above are so outrageous and obnoxious, it makes one wish to send them to Iraq to the front lines to fight the battle they are so dedicated to, as long as they and others around them do not have to serve, with the only exception in this regard being the son of John McCain, who has followed in the distinct tradition of his dad, although his dad is so wrong headed right now on this matter!

Republican “Chicken Hawks” And The Reality Of The Stress Of Military Service!

Ronald 13 Comments

Very few members of Congress or the executive branch have served in the military, so they have no real understanding of the stress of military service, and how it can affect one’s reaction to combat conditions.

But it is Republican “chicken hawks”, and conservative talk show hosts who spout their mouth without any facts, all just to make more money and promote more hate, who have been in the lead in condemning Bowe Bergdahl.

So we have Dick Cheney and many others in the GOP, who avoided service, and talk show hosts who never considered volunteering for military service, who are now being shown up, with the revelation that Bergdahl was tortured, beaten, put in a cage, and has gone through hell in captivity with the Taliban, after wandering off the military base in Afghanistan, without a weapon or any real way to keep contact with the base.

It is clear that Bergdahl had a mental and emotional breakdown, and this can happen to anyone under stress. And now, as a result of captivity for five years, and horrible mistreatment, he has been victimized enough already, but leave it to the hypocrites to do more to destroy whatever peace of mind and sanity he might have left, at the young age of 28!

Any decent human being should denounce the Republicans and conservative talk show hosts on radio and Fox News Channel, as they have demontrated no common decency or concern, but simply have this compelling need to destroy a soldier who volunteered, and obviously, has suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

We should pray that this young man be given a chance to come back into American society, and his parents stop being sent death threats, and the exaggerated accounts by fellow soldiers should be taken “with a grain of salt”, as they are NOT the judge of another person’s mental stability! There is already much evidence from the New York Times that much of what fellow soldiers say is far from accurate in reality!

Chuck Hagel Will Survive Rough Treatment Of John McCain And Other Republicans On Senate Armed Services Committee, And Be Confirmed As Secretary Of Defense!

Ronald 18 Comments

Former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel will survive his rough handling in the Senate Armed Services Committee and be confirmed to be the next Secretary of Defense, despite the efforts of Arizona Senator John McCain, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, and newly minted Texas Senator Ted Cruz, to derail his nomination, more on vindictiveness than anything else. Here was a basically conservative Republican, who like Richard Lugar, had the nerve to be independent, and be willing to cross the aisle and work with Democrats, and even, in the case of Hagel, endorse Barack Obama in 2008.

Hagel is a man of principle, a man of courage and determination, a man of levelheadedness, a man who has served his country well during his years in the military, a man who has been a successful businessman which makes him able to handle the massive bureaucracy of the Pentagon, and a man who is able to deal with adversity as it already has visited him, with his two Purple Hearts while serving in Vietnam, including his bravery in saving his own brother when both were wounded at the same time.

Hagel has a steadiness about him that will make him an outstanding Secretary of Defense, and his criticism of the “surge” in Iraq in 2007, which killed 1200 soldiers and wounded thousands others will stand the test of time, long after John McCain and his hawkishness, which calls for constant military intervention and invasion, is repudiated, as having been the wrong choice for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, two “chicken hawks”, to make.

John McCain will be looked back upon as a man who, fortunately, we did not elect President of the United States, while we will look back upon Chuck Hagel’s service as Secretary of Defense under Barack Obama as one of the best cabinet choices ever made for the Pentagon, if not the best, since the agency was created in 1947!