Dick Cheney and Why His Life Isn't Worth More Than Mine (or Yours)

So as Dick Cheney has been making his rounds on national television defending his record of torture and the invasion of Iraq, he made a stop by Fox News Sunday this morning and elaborated on what I feel has been a very neglected point in his new memoir "In My Life."  Here is the Fox News summary:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday defended his Sept. 11, 2001, order to shoot down hijacked planes over Washington, saying the call was "necessary." 

Cheney gave the authority under the assumption that planes were heading for the nation's capital after hitting the World Trade Center towers in New York City. 

The orders were apparently never passed on to fighter pilots -- and came too late anyway, since the hijacked planes had already crashed. 

But Cheney defended the call on principle.

"Frankly, I didn't pause to think about it very much," Cheney said on "Fox News Sunday." "Once one of those aircraft was hijacked, it was a weapon. ... I saw it as part of my responsibility."

Something tells me Cheney would be right at home with despotism, just as long as he is in charge.  And herein lies a fundamental flaw with democracy and government in general.  The fact that Cheney yields no reluctance to order a plane shot down is disturbing.  Yes, the plane was a weapon (so is the hot cup of coffee I am sipping on), so Cheney took it upon himself to be the sole judge to order the ending of the lives of some over the saving of others (mainly those of himself and others in the White House).  The way the current system operates is that the president, vice president, and other heads of state have their lives regarded as more "precious" and worthy of protection than ours.  The fact that this doesn't strike Chris Wallace, or anybody that questions Dick for that matter, as disturbing shows a lack of journalistic integrity.  Where in the Constitution does it authorize the vice president to make such decisions?  And where in the Constitution is the president given such authority to determine whose life is worthy of being sacrificed for the "greater good."  Reading almost 100 pages of Man, Economy, and State today probably sparked some of this thinking, but regardless, the passiveness by which the media and the public are regarding this issue is troublesome.

If asked directly, I would love to see people's reaction to, "should the president be authorized to order your death if it would be to save his own life as well as other government officials?"  Essentially, should the president's life be valued as greater than the rest of ours?  And what does this say about the abortion issue?

Even if he is more machine than man at this point, it's hard to have any sympathy for Cheney.  Torture, Iraq, wanting to nuke a few countries, wiretapping, and overall disregard for the Constitution aside, ordering the shooting down of the hijacked plane over D.C. on 9/11 is by far the most egregious action he could have taken during his term in office.  The Declaration of Independence clearly states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In a country where Wall Street buys government protection, large financial institutions are incentivized to take on loads of risk through the implicit guarantee of being bailed out by the Federal Reserve, unions are empowered through the threat of punitive government intervention to force employers to recognize them, corporate farms get subsidies, domestic manufactures are protected with tariffs, and loads of cartels are created through government licensing, the idea that we are equal under the law is horsesh!t.

To add insult to injury, it looks like some of Cheney's good friends helped Gadaffi carry out torture back in 2004:

(Reuters) - Documents found in the abandoned Tripoli office of Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence chief indicate the U.S. and British spy agencies helped the fallen strongman persecute Libyan dissidents, Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.
The documents were uncovered by the human rights activist group in the abandoned offices of Libya's former spy chief and foreign minister, Moussa Koussa.

Well would you look at!  It looks like we are trying to oust a dictator we once helped torture his own people because he was.....torturing his own people?  When can we replace the "intelligent" in Central Intelligence Agency with "idiotic?"

I will end with another disturbing image that is quickly defining our foreign policy:

I can only hope the back of the sign says "and rebuild them afterwards."