In this clip, Republican Col. Lawrence Wilkerson sits down with Chris Hayes to lambaste former Vice President and war criminal Dick Cheney’s apocalyptic doomsday predictions regarding the nuclear peace deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. After a short introduction where FOX’s George Wallace confronts Cheney with the fact that the Cheney/Bush administration allowed Iran to greatly expand their nuclear program under his watch, the two begin to discuss the elderly neo-conservative and why he still believes he has any credibility on foreign policy affairs at all:
“I have been searching for a single word that would describe Dick Cheney…and I am afraid the only one that I can think of is ‘insanity’. It’s a deliberate, it’s a methodical, it’s a lucid, often lucid insanity. But it is insanity nonetheless. He can’t recognize reality. He can’t recognize the truth. The good thing Chris, for this country is that Independents, Republicans, and Democrats wish he would just go away now. He has almost no influence. You saw the influence he has virtually by numbers. Those at the AEI (the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank) today that listened to his speech, that’s about it.”
Wilkerson, a Vietnam War veteran, then considers other possible motives, and rightfully draws back to Cheney’s personal wealth: “Cheney is a millionaire now…So maybe I am assuming his insanity and maybe I am wrong. Maybe he sees this as a way, as a route to success and it turned out to be profitable. His personal finances now are quite well established. He is a multi-millionaire. This is a man who in 1998, Chris, said most forcefully as CEO of Halliburton, that sanctions were not working, that they wouldn’t work unless they were comprehensive and international. And he wanted to do deals with Iran. And so he was bashing sanctions up one wall and down the other. This is a man who’s lost his mind.”
It is well known how Cheney’s Halliburton was heavily involved with not only the Iranians before the first Gulf War and profited enormously from Bush’s Iraq War, to the tune of some $39.5 billion. Cheney is a very devious, dangerous man who cannot be allowed to have any say in our foreign policy. His machinations plunged us into disastrous wars of overseas conquest which ended in defeat and the absolute ballooning of our national debt. It is refreshing to see a respected war hero like Wilkerson call him out for continuing to propagate these deranged exaggerations.
Watch it here:
h/t to Egberto Willies at the Daily Kos