Homer Alaska - Letters

About nine years ago, after the 9/11 attack, then Vice President Cheney announced "we're going to have to be taken to the dark side." Remember? Those words certainly made me do a double take.

Cheney, before our eyes, transformed himself into the creepiest person in our history to have attained such position and influence to become the prevailing influence over the president.

He played that strangely conflicted alpha wanabe, President Poor George, like a mournful oboe. Bush's high note: why, he got to be a warrrr-r president.

The vice president, besides being the dark, persuasive force behind Bush misleading us into Iraq, went bonkers with all kinds of beyond the pale license. Starting on 9/12/2001, he became hell bent on unraveling, in the name of security, the very warp and woof of the rule of law of our country, using the fear of another 9/11, or worse in an attempt to splice in, on our American story, his — gone bonkers — version of executive power.

What that man, as vice president, turned out to be about, was the focusing of the dark energy of the fear of that day, 9/11/01, on us to scare us, as far and long as he could out of our stitches. And through providing him with so powerful, horrific an excuse to magnify and ramify fear in our minds, how Osama bin Laden, came close in one incredibly brutal stroke to undoing our political integrity, by putting us so at wits end so as to incite our going rogue on our founding principles.

Call it the bleak tangoing with the bleak to make it all really bleak.

Anyone have a suggestion how this spiraling dynamic might be stanched? Myself, I believe in "truth, justice and the American way." It would be wonderfully healing for the world to behold us, again, living up to ourselves.

That's the last thing some want to see happen.

Tim O'Leary