Dick Cheney on Maintaining the Good Life

by George Thomas Clark

“I am very well fed. Look at pictures of me a generation ago and you will see how I have been eating. I eat all the time. I have earned that right. I am the ultimate political operative in a land of wealth I both understand and control. True, I am not electable to the highest office but that does not matter. I am where I need to be. I am sitting by George W. Bush. He needs me now. He always has. He understands I know so much more.

“I am expert on all significant matters both domestic and foreign. I was the youngest presidential Chief of Staff in history, for Gerald Ford, and I managed Ford’s 1976 campaign, and served five terms as a Wyoming congressman and one year as House Minority Whip, and voted against a resolution demanding that Nelson Mandela be released from prison in South Africa because his African National Congress was a terrorist group that “had a number of interests fundamentally inimical to the United States.” I was also a powerhouse advocate for the petroleum and coal industries of my state and the nation, and my unique experiences propelled me into the Pentagon, as Secretary of Defense, where I skillfully administrated the invasions of Panama and Kuwait and Iraq.

“During much of the 1990’s it was of course painful to see this nation in the arms of the libidinous President Clinton who was both “incoherent (and) inconstant (as he) squandered opportunities” and left us weak and vulnerable. Even though I was most busy as Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton for five years, I manufactured time in 1997 to found the Project for the New American Century. My comrades in arms were other brilliant parlor patriots like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams, and John Bolton.

“We perceived that America had inalienable rights and duties as the preeminent power in the history of the world, and we articulated many quintessential tasks. The United States was manfully obligated to show “resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” To do so, the nation would have to rebuild its defenses in order to dominate others through use of force, to establish democracies by military means, to launch preemptive wars, to fight multiple wars, to establish U.S. military bases in critical areas such the Persian Gulf states. And we were explicitly determined to take control of Iraq whether or not Saddam Hussein remained in power. Naturally, it would be beneficial if he stayed as a target. We further understood that our forces would with missionary zeal also have to perform extensive “constabulary duties.” And we needed supremacy not merely on the ground. We needed unparalleled space forces and missile defenses and Internet forces, and of course to have all that we needed to increase our already stratospheric defense spending by about twenty-five percent.

We knew what America needed. It needed what it desired. It desired enhancement of the most special lifestyle any people ever had. Our success was assured when George W. Bush selected me as his vice presidential running mate and we won in a judicial landslide. Early in our first term, the president asked me to direct the National Energy Policy Development Group. With a variety of energy experts including Ken Lay and other Enron executives and executives from other energy firms and numerous energy lobbyists, we forged policies that would enhance our pursuit of goals in the New American Century. These goals required lots of energy as well as money. These goals should have been confidential but two traitorous organizations, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, kept suing me for access to information about meetings, and I have battled them to suppress as much as possible. That is good policy.

“People do not need to know this administration’s ravenous pursuit of energy is depleting aquifers and creating big-truck traffic jams and smog in numerous recently pristine areas, including parts of my beloved Wyoming. They have no right to complain that our oil and gas acquisition teams have erected drilling rigs far more densely than tree huggers and other liberals would like. What do they really want except to complain? They certainly do not want to walk. And no solar or wind car is going to get their lazy asses wherever people like that go.

“I go hunting and I know about guns. I also know about war. I have read a lot about it and talked a lot about it and often explained why it is so vital. That is why Joseph Wilson, our former ambassador to Iraq, should have been muzzled. He traveled and investigated and reported in 2003 that the president and I and others were wrong and deceitful in stating that Iraq was obtaining uranium for nuclear weapons from Niger. He was a traitor. You know what happens to traitors. High government officials leak that their wives are CIA agents. People are trying to tie this leak to my office. What a crock. Have you seen Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame? She is no spook in hiding. She is a flashy blond posing for glossy shots with Wilson in their convertible and sitting at a restaurant table. They are trying to bring me down. They will not succeed. More than any man I understand America’s greatest needs and how to fulfill them.”