We heard them at the last Republican National Convention emerge as big oil shills.  One by one like so many white rabbits John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Rudolph Guiliani were trotted out to deliver the major pitch of the moment:

"Drill, baby, drill!"

That simple three word declaration rocked the convention hall that evening in St. Paul more than any other.  As the television camera panned the convention floor a huge constellation of signs merged with the loud shouts of approval from Republican speakers.

These were the true, red-blooded Americans who spurned all this sissified conservation nonsense.  Conservation is the kind of nonsense that emerges from places that shirk real honest to goodness patriotism, places like San Francisco, Madison, Berkeley, tree-hugging Seattle.

The venerable Dick Cheney has said so many memorable things in his long career that have been long digested and discussed, but my most unforgettable quote was regarding the Vietnam War, that Southeast Asian conflict that he unflinchingly supported.

When asked why as a young man he did not serve in what he constantly described as a noble conflict and used every college deferment he could muster to stay out of it until that approach dried up, after which he impregnated his wife to bring the issue of potential service to a close, his answer was short and to the point:

"I had other priorities."

Cheney's history on Vietnam is a textbook paradigm for the master plan of the chicken hawk:

What else can you call it when the Obama Justice Department rules that the Bush team lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to quote the New York Times February 19 story, "had used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct"?

This decision shreds the carefully constructed reasoning that the United States prosecution team presented, and that was adopted, at the Nuremberg Trials.  Under the Obama Justice Department's rationale regarding Yoo and Bybee, all Nazi defendants tried under those proceedings, which set a precedent thereafter, would have been set free.

In the cases of the Nazi defendants the argument repeatedly asserted was "We were following orders."  Under the Obama Justice Department ruling the defense was more like "Oops, it is easy for anyone to make a mistake, particularly in moments of great pressure."

Oddly enough, this is one time when Dick Cheney has demonstrated a higher standard of probity than those analyzing the conduct of Yoo and Bybee.  It was Cheney who recently conceded that the executive branch controlled Justice Department "opinions" on torture.

Dick Cheney's recent comments are reflective of the adage, "The best defense is a good offense."  In addition, visibility is important, many political insiders say, because he continues working on that book he hopes will be finished and released soon.

As for Dick Cheney's view of the world, it is dark, it is foreboding, and it operates in lockstep with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century and the New World Order.

Cheney along with PNAC insiders such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and William Kristol lobbied mightily then President Bill Clinton to launch a war against Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power.  

Once that George W. Bush was installed in the Oval Office by a United States Supreme Court one vote majority, Cheney as spokesperson for the neocons approached Assignment Iraq War with speedy relish.

Goodbye Walmart,

Hello inflation.

As the U.S. dollar declines

You can count on inflation

To rock our nation.

Throwing all that cash into Iraq

Nearly 5,000 U.S. Soldiers

Will never come back.

Bush and Cheney got us

Into this tragic mess,

Every honest American

Must confess!

Obama won't look back on Iraq

To properly punish those who

Instigated this ill fated attack.

The Teabaggers turned out for a major Washington, D.C. demonstration September 12 and displayed the seething hate and shameful hypocrisy for which the movement has become infamous.

Two notable elements of the demonstration and the explanations on television and radio that followed from their supporters on their significance were the economic perils America currently faces along with sympathy for the nation's middle class for the beating it is taking.

How interesting that these Teabagger events began after Democratic President Barack Obama took office.  America already had compiled over a $10 trillion debt before Obama and a Democratic Congress assumed office.

Who was minding the store when the U.S. debt became the highest in the history of the planet?  How did this come to pass?  

While aides in Eric Holder's Justice Department stress the importance of investigating the CIA for abuses of suspected terrorists, Obama continues to make one disconcerting point.

On numerous instances, including the issue of investigating Dick Cheney and George W. Bush for numerous abuses, highlighted by taking America to war based on false evidence, Obama has made the point that he prefers looking ahead and not to the past.

As a lawyer and former teacher of constitutional law, Obama should realize that an imperative exists in that vital area.  As president of the United States he is compelled to move in areas where the constitution mandates him to take care that laws be faithfully executed.  

Two of the most precious areas of the Constitution that mandate vigilant action are conducting wars and civil liberty violations.  Instances of such violations abounded during the past administration of Cheney and Bush.

U.S. service personnel are not, definitely not, fighting now for the same reasons as what they fought for in World War Two.

There are those in the government who have propagandized to make Americans think that U.S. service personnel who have died or been wounded in Iraq for the freedom that lives and health were sacrificed for in World War Two, but the facts are proving them wrong.

The charge of being unpatriotic is sometimes leveled against those who dare to point out that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney led the U.S. into the Iraq War on a series of lies calculated to strike fear of a frightful nuclear holocaust.  

Saddam Hussein was terrorizing the U.S.A. with weapons of mass destruction.  The false claim that Saddam Hussein was well on the road to nuclear weapons development was calculated to frighten U.S. citizens into the Iraq War.

From the point shortly prior to the time that Dick Cheney theoretically gave up the reins of Halliburton to run on a ticket headed by George W. Bush in 2000 to the present, his conduct has involved multiple layers of deceit.  

The Machiavellian antics of Cheney commenced with his resolution of his position heading the selection committee for a running mate to serve with Bush when he ordained himself as the best qualified individual, reportedly outraging ordained minister and former United States Senator John Danforth of Missouri.  

Under the circumstances, if Danforth, at one time considered to be Cheney's choice, was as innocent as conventional wisdom believed, he had every right to conclude he had been no more than a duped fall guy for a power hungry political opportunist charging forward at full gallop.

Many experts believed that the U.S. Constitution had been violated by allowing Cheney on the ticket.  The point raised was that, as Halliburton's president operating out of its Texas headquarters, Cheney was a resident of the lone star state rather than that in which he grew up and resided in while in Congress -- Wyoming.  

Nobody could say that President Reagan went to war in Afghanistan to deliver either freedom or democracy by putting the Taliban in power.

We know that Russia was arming Afghanistan fighters on one side, while the U.S. supplied the Mujahideen, the forerunners of the Taliban, with our latest technology capped by stinger missiles that were used to shoot down Soviet Union planes.

Oh, and there was also a tall, gangly, largely unknown leader of that conflict who kept the CIA posted on activities.  You may have since heard of him.  This "freedom fighter" was none other than Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban consists of radical Islamic extremists who refuse to allow women to be educated and deny many other freedoms.  Could this have really been a fight to control those oil pipelines running across Afghanistan to the sea, where ships can carry oil to thirsty nations?

Vincent Bugliosi has expressed recent exasperation over the issue of torture being mentioned currently with greater frequency over what the former L.A. County prosecutor believes to be the key issue over which George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should face trial -- murder.

Bugliosi's concern, through which he urges action from an American prosecutorial body to bring Bush and Cheney to trial, could be directly addressed through the international tribunal of the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

A reputable source of keeping up to date about the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the initial "shock and awe" attacks on Baghdad ordered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prior to occupying that city and the nation of Iraq is Just Foreign Policy.  This informative site provides international detailed analysis of significant events throughout the world.

Just Foreign Policy publishes numbers based on the highly respected international medical journal The Lancet.  According to The Lancet's detailed continuing study, supportive evidence of which is supplied by Just Foreign Policy, the current death figure is much higher than that reported by America's mainstream media on those rare occasions when any such information is presented.

It was understandable that of all the Republicans, save drug-addicted talk show host Rush Limbaugh, the one to fire the first and loudest opening growl at President Barack Obama was you.

Considering your track record, could we have expected anything else?

The subject matter was thoroughly predictable, seeking to generate terror in the hearts of Americans with your latest wolf cry of the imminent attack we are facing from international terrorists.

You take bows for keeping Americans safe from terrorism on your watch and that of George W. Bush.  Talk to Richard Clarke and any other bona fide terrorist expert and a different story emerges of those repeated warnings before 9/11 to which the administration in which you served and feel so prideful about did nothing.

Anyone who has bothered traveling to the United Kingdom or the European heartland and talked with informed individuals without ties to the New World Order knows what the conventional wisdom is regarding George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  

Why do you suppose there has been such a continuing full court press to demonize intelligent opinion in other nations with absurdist and childish comments such as "They really hate us!" as well as childish freedom fry campaigns?

In those nations they actually pay attention to the United Nations along with the Geneva and Nuremberg codes.  American leadership helped establish all of the aforementioned.  They have been brutally sacked by a tyrannical regime that the incoming president who promised substantive change appears ready to let off the hook in the interest of "moving on" to the present and the future.

In that Barack Obama was once president of the Harvard Law Review it should not be necessary to inform him of the necessity of a nation presumably existent under the United States Constitution to carry out the laws as mandated by that instrument adopted at the beginning of America.

As someone who wrote a book, "Struggle for the Holy Land,"  on the Middle East encompassing the long histories of Arabs and Jews I recognized from the outset the imperative need for international leadership to be exercised through constructive diplomacy.

When I recently sent a manuscript to a British publisher with the reputation of tackling tough and controversial international issues, and that prided itself on being progressive, the editor sent me an e-mail declaring that it took him 32 pages to decide that I had concluded that Arabs and Jews were equally at fault for the conflict while he believed that the root problem lay at the doorstep of the Israelis.

I promptly e-mailed and took him over the route of my first 32 pages.  I pointed out that I had not found "fault" with either group and that this was not the objective and my effort, which was to address the long history of each people extending back some 3,500 years, focusing on points on common along with differences.  The objective was to develop understanding and point the way toward diplomatic conflict resolution.

My response to the editor's criticism, which pointed out areas that he had mentioned, and from which he had drawn an erroneous conclusion about my work, was greeted by silence.  This was not surprising.  Too many believe that all writers approaching the Middle East should ultimately praise one group and denounce the other.  

"Change it or lose it" is the operative phrase regarding planet earth.  If dramatic changes are not made to combat the severe impact on global warming international authority is in broad agreement that the response will be calamitous.

Bob Herbert of the New York Times in a luminously scathing critique of the Bush years on appropriately the last day of 2008, the final year of Bush's shameful custodianship, that it is not enough to let him pass quietly from the Washington scene.  Herbert stated that loud demonstrations outside the White House replete with bullhorns would be appropriate.

Bush and Cheney have marched in unfailing lockstep with the most reactionary elements of a ruthless corporate establishment bolstered by an unrelenting New World Order and full speed profits ahead and damn the consequences entities such as Halliburton, the Carlyle Group and Kissinger and Associates.

Not only has war been perpetrated on a tissue of lies predicated on non-existent weapons of mass destruction; not only has torture been meted out with crass and destructive indifference at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, replete with waterboarding; the savagery of a global profit motive bereft of conscience has challenged survival of the planet.