Mark Morford begins his characteristically-restrained critique (just kidding!) of the appalling usurper of the office of U.S. vice-president,
We have a war-crazed vice president. An addict, a verifiable military junkie. Many of us perhaps do not fully realize this.Yes, he's supposedly the second most powerful man in the world, but he essentially controls every decision made by the most powerful man in the world [Morford cautions, "which hence makes him the de facto most powerful man in the world shhh don't tell Geedubya or he might have a tantrum"]We are very unfortunately saddled with one of the least charismatic least interesting most intellectually acrimonious and most desperately hawkish, violence-hungry, soulfully inscrutable vice president in decades, and he wants this country at war, now and always. Oh yes he does.
And we have to realize there is no one in the upper Bush administration who is acting as a balancing voice, who is calling for peace, perhaps urging a major rethinking of our oil and military policies, someone of significant intellectual depth and compassion who understands the nuances of our voracious foreign policy and if you said Colin Powell you haven't seen the pictures, all slumped shoulders and vacant eyes and impotent trips to Israel, emasculated and exhausted. Powell is Cheney's favorite footstool.So here is Dick Cheney, howling into a vacuum, calling for more and increased violence and major expenditure and further stirring of anti-US hate in the face of almost unanimous global opposition. And Rumsfeld is grinning like mad.
And Bush, well, he's on the horn to his dad every night, slumping in the Oval Office chair as the old man advises and snickers and grumbles about old grudges against Saddam and how we need to rip him a new one dag-nabbit. Poor Dubya is getting it from both sides, his two main puppeteers, urging war, as the world frowns, shakes its head, sighs.