Our Inaugural viewing pod thought Dick Cheney’s wheelchair was a clever ploy. We didn’t fall for it. He couldn’t have strained his back lifting file boxes. The files had all been shredded months ago. We bet the wheelchair was intended to garner him some Pinochetish sympathy. Who would prosecute an old, stooped, white-haired man in a wheelchair for war crimes? Uh, Dick would.
Well, he’s baaaaack! In an interview with Politico, Cheney astride his high horse, patiently side-mouthed to his scribes that Obama’s policies invited terrorist attacks. He denounced the closing of Gitmo and bemoaned the suspension of his favorite interrogation techniques.
Which caused MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to go into an eleven-minute, high dudgeon rant addressed directly to Cheney, with a lot of “You sirs” and squinty, glinty eyeballing. As if Cheney were home watching Countdown on his flat panel TV while cleaning his gun. Olbermann finished, and man was he steamed, but it was hard to take seriously because he’d just finished sucking up to Super Bowl players on ESPN. I bet if Cheney was in his barcalounger, back from padding off for another beer, he merely groused, “So?” and shot the TV.
At least George has the decency just to go Baylor basketball games and keep his mouth shut. Okay, cancel the decency. Old Dick does not follow the Obama way. I wish Obama didn’t either. I know it’s only seventeen days. I know, after eight years, I have to give the new uber-bipartisan gestalt a chance to work. I’ve tried it a few times in my relationship when we’re wrangling about something like, oh, money. I just stop and say, “Honey, that’s not the Obama way.” And we hug.
But from up here in Manhattan, the former financial capital of the world, where more and more stunned young men in everyday-is-casual-day pressed Dockers are seen at the playground mid-afternoon, one hand pushing a kid on a swing, the other thumbing a Blackberry, I just want to say to DC, “Do not make me come down there.”
In his monologue Cheney also grumped that nobody saw something of the size and dimension of our economic collapse occurring. That sounds similar to his claim about the 2001 terrorist attacks. So if he now sees another terrorist attack coming, perhaps he can look out his Wyoming ponderosa windows and see the depression coming, and warn his little conservative, obstructionist pals about it. If certain Republican senators do not like Obama’s stimulus plan, then fine, your state will not get any of the moneys. Is that bipartisan enough?
In the teeth of the economic storm, I often feel silly yapping about LGBT identity politics. “We have no job, no home and little food,” seems to trump, “I want my gay rights!”
John D’Emilio, professor of history and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said recently that it might be more helpful to recalculate our Gay Positioning System. Gay activists can join with labor, civil rights activists, immigrant rights workers, youth organizers and peace activists and together denounce the terrible success of other identity movements – the perfect storm of the filthy rich and Christian conservative identity movements.