What does Dick Chenney want?

For eight long years, he looked at us with scorn and despised the media. He brushed off the concerns of Americans about the unethical behavior of the Bush administration and devised the most egregious form of abuse of the U.S. constitution in the history of the country. You would think that someone with such an unenviable track record would gladly accept the relative obscurity that comes with being out of public office. Not former Vice President Dick Chenney. All of a sudden, he has become the spokesperson of the Republican party’s misguided obstructionist stance toward the new president.

We have probably seen more of Dick Chenney in the past six months than we did when he was VP for eight years. So the question is, why the sudden desire to “take” on the new president? Some have argued that he is trying to speak up in defense of the minions who collaborated in his secret dictatorship and the ill-advised experimentation with the gulag concept and are now in the cross-hairs of the justice department. Another argument is that he is worried that with the move toward transparency by the Obama administration, some of the very bad things they did will be exposed and he is therefore trying to shift the focus of the discussion to the good and reliable question of “national security”. I personally believe that Dick Chenney, at heart, is an autocrat, and a dictator. The type of material that would have fit snugly in the “president-for-life” scenarios we have seen played out in other parts of the world. I believe he was envious of Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin and Kim Jung Il and secretly wished he had the powers to wipe out entire villages and not have anyone question his actions. I am sure Dick Chenney admires the brutal leaders in some parts of the world who had the power to send people to the gallows by merely blinking. How else can you explain his brazen defense of torture, arbitrary arrests,  unconstitutional wire tappings and the ignoble policy of rendition which contracted out the torture of suspects. From his recent speeches and actions, it is obvious that the former VP does not see the disconnect between killing Saddam Hussein for torturing and murdering innocent people, and the implementation of those same policies and tactics by the Bush administration.