Showing posts with label Dick Cheney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dick Cheney. Show all posts

Thursday, March 29, 2012

A Guest Post on Dick Cheney's New Heart

 Guest poster ,I. Mangrey,  has a sharp tongue and a good imagination. Here he offers up a sardonic vision of what might have gone on during Cheney's heart transplant surgery along with his own observations on Dick Cheney, the man and the myth. Hint: Mangrey is NOT a big Dick Cheney fan.

Dick Cheney, who recently cancelled a trip to our northern neighbor saying Canada was too dangerous, is now recovering after receiving a heart transplant. First there’s the matter of The Second Butcher of Baghdad saying that Canada’s dangerous. Canada? I can’t even remember the last time Canada shot someone in the face. I’m pretty sure that Canada thinks Cheney is too dangerous so I doubt they have any regrets.

Then there’s the matter of one of the most horrific figures in American political history taking what must have been a perfectly good heart that could have gone to someone more deserving like Rick Perry who has lots of available space between his ears for any of a number of objects, or the artificially animated Mitt Romney who would be able to use the heart indefinitely as he “lives” out his years entertaining Americans by running for president over and over and over, or maybe a homeless person who could use a pick-me-up.

In any event, doctors worked diligently to perform what is now a fairly common procedure. Except in this case it was not nearly so routine. In almost all cases to date, the surgery was performed to replace a damaged heart, but in Cheney’s case the doctors were greeted with something of a surprise when they entered the chest cavity of one of America’s most recent war criminals. The lead surgeon at the Halliburton Medical Center mused,
 “I can’t say some of us didn’t have our suspicions going in, but we treated it as something of a joke. I don’t think any of us actually expected there would really be no heart in there. I mean many people are referred to as heartless, but even I always assumed this was just a derisive figure of speech, or by Cheney’s standards a term of endearment. As a doctor/mercenary you kind of assume that the human organism is incapable of survival without such a vital organ. In most cases you would be right. But it turns out that in Mr. Cheney’s case his body managed to survive on sheer willpower and a deep-seated hatred of mankind.”

They say Cheney had an untold number of heart attacks starting at age 37. If it is indeed true that he had a heart, it would seem that that heart knew early on that Cheney should be stopped before doing any real damage. The presence of a heart in that, by-all-appearances-human form, does stretch the imagination, but I suppose the possibility exists despite the inability of his current surgeons to detect one.

 Maybe since this heart doesn’t know Cheney personally it won’t start attacking him immediately. Perhaps since The Dark Shadow is - as far as we can tell - retired, this poor hijacked heart will allow him to live out the rest of his nights.


I. Mangrey reporting.
Thanks for listening. Responsible comment (and spare parts) invited.
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Sunday, May 10, 2009

Obama Wows the Washington Press

If President Obama ever wants to make a career change, he has a great future ahead of him as a stand up comedian. He wowed em in Washington at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner last night. Thank you MSNBC for broadcasting the whole thing live. I had a ball.

The prez was a hoot, throwing out zingers and one liners like a Las Vegas pro. His timing was perfect. My favorite line was about Dick Cheney's memoirs being tentatively titled " How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People. " I also loved the part about Rahm Emanuel having a hard time with Mothers Day because " he isn't used to saying the word day after the word mother". Is that clever, sophisticated material or what?

President Obama was polished, pointed and funny, but never stepped over the line into slapstick or bad taste. He even managed to make fun of himself with grace and style. What a guy!

It says something about the state of the media that the New York Times, for the third year in a row, refused to attend the event out of journalistic scrupulousness, while the twitterati were live blogging every real-time detail from their iphones(#nerdprom).

For those of you who didn't catch President Obama's comic debut last night, here's the video from Youtube-- all nine and a half minutes of it. Enjoy!


Saturday, April 25, 2009

Waterboarding and the Spanish Inquisition

Dick Cheney doesn't seem to feel any pangs of remorse about waterboarding or other forms of "enhanced interrogation" used by the Bush Administration. Cheney thinks waterboarding is just fine when practiced by the "good guys" on the "bad guys."

According to him, waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced information that prevented an attack on Los Angeles so it was just great to do it.We'll never know the truth of this assertion, but we do know that before Bush made it OK by special memo, waterboarding was definitely considered torture by the United States and is still considered torture by most of the world. We didn't think much of the Nazi's using it during World War II. But then, what are a few trivial details?

Not since the days of the Spanish Inquisition has there been such a bruhaha about what does and does not constitute torture. Tomás de Torquemada would be proud. In his day the justification was that by getting a heretic to recant his heresies you were saving his soul, even if you were using thumbscrews to do it. Death was not a problem as long as the soul was saved.

It seems things have not changed much in the ensuing years. It's still a very slippery slope when one starts thinking that the end justifies the means and Pride still heads the list of the seven deadly sins. Perhaps there is still time for Dick Cheney to learn humility before he meets St. Peter at the pearly gates.

illustration from:http://whgbetc.com/mind/inquisition.html