BartBlog

A Choice Excerpt from President Cheney’s Speech at Arlington National Cemetery, Nov. 11, 2007:

“America may be a country founded in revolution, but we’ve never been a warrior culture, especially in my case — I dodged the draft with five deferments; I just had better things to do at that time than get my ass shot off in Vietnam defending democracy from the threat of communism or whatever. Now, we are a democracy defended by volunteers, and we can’t find many of those these days as even the half-wit proles have caught on to our game and we’re forced to recruit ex-cons. We’re a peaceful nation, ha, ha, with friends to the north and the south of us that hate our guts, and great oceans to the east and the west of us that have the polar ice caps melting into them, thanks to the air pollution that my administration eagerly encourages. Yet these blessings alone have never been enough to assure safety at home or peace in our world when there’s so much goddamned money to be made from war. At times in our history, arms and ideologies have been massed against us, and we have heard the call to bring freedom, new hope, and healing to afflicted peoples. These days we still utilize all that flag-waving malarkey to sell our wars to the peasantry, but cut right to the chase for our campaign contributors — big no-bid contracts from Uncle Sucker!

“America has faced these challenges, often at very high cost, but not a cost paid by me or my family — actually, we’re getting filthy rich from our wars. We see part of that cost right here on the hills of Arlington, where George Bush was too timid or embarrassed to show up today. Who cares — we all know I’m the real president anyway. And the legacy of the American armed forces is truly extraordinary. They’ve thrown back tyrants, liberated death camps, carried out heroic rescues, and kept the peace in volatile regions, doodah, doodah. And today they serve the interests of large oil companies, my old friends at Halliburton, and my new friends, the private mercenaries of Blackwater. Above all, they have kept us free in the land we call the ‘homeland’ — free to live as we see fit if we are among the lucky top ten percent in income, free to work at low-wage jobs without health benefits, and worship Jesus or else, and speak our minds as long as we agree with our government, and have the Supreme Court, Diebold and Ken Blackwell choose our leaders — most of all, we’re free to profit from war and disaster capitalism. All of this, we owe to the men and women who have taken that oath to defend America, the same oath I took to defend the Constitution and quickly ignored. And may the rest of us never take them for granted the way my White House does.

“Gathered as we are today in a time of war I helped start with cherry-picked intelligence, we’re only more sharply aware of the nation’s debt to the members of the armed forces, and a little less aware of the $2 billion a day we’re borrowing from China to keep our Middle Eastern catastrophe going, while not raising your taxes to pay it back. They are constantly in our thoughts, I mean our military, except when it comes to providing decent food, updated equipment, and veterans’ benefits to the wounded. Our gratitude extends to their loved ones, as long as they stay in line and pose for photo-ops, because military service is often a family commitment, and they, too, are giving up a lot for the good of our whole nation, something you won’t catch me or George Junior doing. Have a Happy Veterans Day, people — I know I will!”

[Read the full text here.]