Aquarian Weekly 3/20/02
REALITY CHECK

THE DICK CHENEY
WORLD TOUR

We can all rest easy now that Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak is on board for the long overdue house cleaning that will be stomping through an Iraqi outpost very soon. Seeing how Egypt is mostly a satellite of Israel and its plummeting tourist numbers, Mubarak's approbation is not nearly as newsworthy as the fact that the vice president has decided to come out of his hermetically sealed hibernation tank to grace the Middle East with his notorious presence.

It's all part of the 2002 Dick Cheney World Tour, or more to the point, Arabian tour, where he will entertain the insane jabbering of atavistic patriarchs waxing poetic on anti-Semitism and crude oil prices, which have been steadily rising over the past weeks since our president started upping the ante on these haughty catch phrases of his.

Not that anyone at the time it was uttered seemed to mind the tasty allegory found in Junior's pithy, "axis of evil" comment. In fact, if you can find a congressman or news commentator with a modicum of pride left in Washington these days, one might even say the crazy bastard nailed it on the head.

Fuck Iraq, and any dumbasses that still find themselves trapped inside of it. How many years of this pathetic bullshit are we supposed to stomach before someone with a pair of steel rocks puts the fear of Allah in Saddam Hussein?

Captain Shoe-in is just the man for the job. His father failed. His predecessor, the Minister of Fun obviously couldn't hack it. He has the blessing of these outrageous approval numbers and no one appears to care about Enron ending civilization anymore.

But I am way off the path here.

There is no truth to the reports that on Dick Cheney's last visit to these shores he begged the president's daddy to ramrod the scud express into Baghdad as acting chairman of Desert Storm. Cheney is a man of varied foreign policy skills, and one of the reasons why the Bush people pushed the Texas governor to add the old man to the ticket two summers ago.

But some people claim Cheney never advised the first Bush to "cut the head off the wounded reptile." That was the boastful talk of patriotic crazies who once found it necessary to report that General Patton begged Harry Truman to use the U.S. Army to plow through Poland and up into Stalin's living room to "personally kick that son of a bitch in the ass."

Cheney never had it in him, but that's what Jordan's King Abdullah would have the traveling UPI geeks believing. Except for the glaring fact that Jordan was so overwhelmed eleven years ago, they had Syria and Iran thinking they would apply for a Euro-NFL franchise.

It was nice of the king to offer his meaningless opinion on the matters of American war policy though.

Here's what he doesn't get: The vice president's eleven-state Terrorpaloooza road show has two faces.

There is the diplomatic "smooth the locals and keep the fracturing coalition intact for the impending big hit", traveling photo op. Followed closely by the more intriguing, "let's cut the crapolla chief and get down to the Nitty Gritty" stop off.

The Nitty would be the current "second phase" of this infinite War on Terror, not including the Anaconda thing that has been unfortunately running the bills up way past the spec limit in what's left of Afghanistan. The pussy footing with the Philippines and the impossible mess going on in Korea not withstanding, the real crux of what is left of that gaping hole in lower Manhattan and that chunk of the Pentagon missing over by the Potomac has bore a great big, juicy target on Iran and Iraq.

The Gritty would be a not-so-subtle propaganda mission to pit certain Arab nations against each other based on economic concerns and desperate security measures in the region, especially the security of the Palestinian state that is about three more car bombs from extinction if the gloves are truly off for the Israeli Defense Force.

In times of foreign military action, it is important for a nation to not spread itself too thin. I think this is best understood not by history scholars, but by those ruthless bastards from my high school days who used to sit next to me around a large kitchen table and play RISK until the last bloodied man was standing.

God, I miss that.

But once again, I cannot stay on track.

And that's probably a good thing, considering that this column has become a bit of a dangerous mark on my permanent record in these times high paranoia.
It's important to make my comments seem random and half-baked, loaded with carefully placed expletives and wry references to board games.

Divide and conquer.

The oldest one in the book.

But make no mistake here. Dick Cheney is the perfect angel of mercy to prelude the harbinger of doom. Who that will be, is anyone's guess. Not even my stoolie, Georgetown is coming clean on that one, and I wouldn't be bold enough to venture a guess.

Some of the right people will tell you these latest skewed ravings coming from the woefully out of touch U.N. Security Council about a resolution that "affirms a vision" of an official Palestinian state in the borders of Israel, where the Jews and Palestinians will live in beatific harmony, is a sign that something concrete in the way of missile tonnage is coming soon.

Now even Cheney himself is forced to consider this lunacy out on the front lines, while his boss riles up the American citizenry with talk of nuclear bombardment and Wrath of God 101.

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