To anyone with a heart. To anyone with a soul. To anyone with even a remnant of basic human decency, Dick Cheney is cause for weeping. For his victims. For us.
Dick Cheney is one of the most gruesome public figures in American history. From his youthful days as a chickenhawk who received five deferments to avoid having to serve in a war he supported to his latter years as a national leader whose dithering incompetence allowed the worst ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and who then attempted to compensate and obfuscate by lying this nation into an illegal, immoral, and unnecessary war, Cheney is a man who deserves to be reviled and brought to justice as a suspected mass murderer and war criminal. He unabashedly advocates torture. He postures as a snarling tough guy while getting his jollies engaged in a form of sportless hunting where the victims are trapped and helpless, almost literally fish shot in a barrel. He is venal and weak and petty and dishonest and as despicable a human being as this nation has produced. Given the opportunity, there seems little that is cruel and rapacious and greedy and selfish that he wouldn't consider doing.
I don't believe in dancing on people's graves. I don't believe in capital punishment. I don't believe in a retributive theistic deity that will make Cheney pay for his crimes in some mythological eternity. I do believe that Cheney's greatest punishment is being Dick Cheney. His demonically desperate efforts to prove that he's tough, serious, and correct serve only to prove how little he actually believes any of it, himself. Greatness needs not posture greatness. Toughness needs not prove its toughness. Cheney may sometimes succeed in fooling himself, but in the vast cold emptiness wherein his shriveled soul screams for any facsimile of a shard of validation, Cheney knows better. By all that truly matters in this Universe, Cheney is a nobody and a nothing. Even on a mere human scale, he is as great a failure as it is possible to imagine a person being.
Dick Cheney likely will die in comfort. Probably surrounded by his loved ones. Probably at a relatively advanced age. Probably while living in luxury. The way most people would like to die. Dick Cheney won't ever pay for his crimes. He never will be tried in a judicial procedure. He will continue to mock the very concept of justice by bragging and flaunting his crimes, knowing that he won't ever be held accountable for having committed them. He will continue to be celebrated by political lunatics and by the debased corporatist media. He will live the rest of his life on his own terms. He will continue his efforts to elevate his nasty and incompetent daughter into a national political figure. He may very well live to see his efforts succeed. The only punishment Cheney ever will suffer is that of being Dick Cheney. His victims and their survivors never will get their days in court, or his years in a prison cell in The Hague.
Dick Cheney is cause for weeping. For the world to which he did so much damage. For the nation that produced him, elevated him to power, and now protects him. For the concepts of truth and justice and morality and decency that he does so much to destroy.