“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said in the interview published Wednesday.

I used to live in Los Angeles for a few years. Anyone who’s lived there knows it’s a one-horse town, and that horse is the Entertainment industry. Those with an itch to enter it has made the pilgrimage out there at least once. Anyway, I never warmed to the place. First of all, there’s very little variety. Most of the conversations you have center around films. There’s a huge gap between rich and poor - and you end up living in a bubble; the space between where you live, where you go and who you meet and the hours in between where you’re in your car.

The day I left town to move elsewhere was like taking in air again. It took me an hour and a half in the car, just at the edge of the desert, to find the fog of 5 years lifting. I remember saying to myself, “What the hell was I thinking all these years.” All at once I realized anew the world wasn’t about the small microcosm of L.A. and that industry. The pressures and motivations of my life there were all constructed within the fabrication of that little bubble and really didn’t exist outside of there. By the time I got to my new home I was a changed man. Infrequently I meet friends who still live there and are still caught up in that mousetrap - still chasing an imaginary carrot and living within that strange, cloistered culture that rarely lets the real world penetrate. They’re friends, and I love them, but I wish they could see what I see.

I feel the same way when I talk to people who are still wrapped up in this fabricated world that Bush and Cheney have created. They built it on the platform of fear and kept us all scared. In Cheney’s case, maybe he really believed this shit - still does. Fortunately, most of the country has pulled itself out of this fog and can see what morally corrupt, lying charlatans these people have been.

No one is ever saying we need to go soft on terrorists. No one has EVER said that, certainly not Obama (even though the far right will do their damndest to make you think he has). These are words that only exist in the fabricated world of the past administration, one where everything is black and white. Either you treat all our prisoners like garbage, or you’re a terrorist sympathizer.

It’s time for everyone who’s scared to rediscover what the real world looks like out there, and have the courage to stay in it. Cheney’s Pottersville of Fear and Conformity needs to become a ghost town soon, so we can get on with the real fights ahead.

Politics bush, cheney, fear, Obama, terrorism