Is Dick Cheney campaigning for 2012 or trying to keep out of prison?

After spending nearly the entire second Bush term in his undisclosed bunker, Dick Cheney (and his snarling bulldog) have been all over the place of late, trying to bring his party back to the good old days, when every word out of an administration mouthpiece's mouth would make Americans bend to the Bush/Cheney will, whether it was about an unnecessary war, torture, warrantless wiretapping, or any of the many still-undiscovered Bush administration atrocities. We may joke about the black hole that is Dick Cheney's soul having to be stoked every day with the auras of the dead like a vampire needing to feed on blood, but there is something deeply disturbing about this Prince of Darkness suddenly being ubiquitous to try to warn America that Bad Things Are Coming under the watch of the current occupant of the White House.

The deal with Dick Cheney was always that he didn't have political aspirations to higher office and was never an heir apparent, but I'm not so sure. He sure looks like a 2012 candidate, with his unprecedented bad form in taking every opportunity possible to badmouth the current president. What worries me is that this is a guy who clearly had advance knowledge of an attack about to take place on American soil and made damn sure that the head guy was out of town that day so that he could run things from the undisclosed location of his bunker. This is a guy who could arrange another attack by just getting on the phone. He likes power, he likes the dictatorial unitary executive, and he's not about to let anyone take that away from the office. Why do that if he doesn't have designs on the office himself?

Another interpretation of Cheney's sudden talkativeness is that he is trying to stay out of prison. But with official Washington loath to take on the somber duty to hold trials for the war criminals who composed the last administration, I'm not sure how much he needs to be concerned, unless the Spanish are preparing to send troops here to find him and take him to Spain for trial. We really don't have the stomach for taking strong action against war criminals. It took over two decades to get John Demjanjuk extradited to stand trial for Nazi war crimes, and it's questionable how much "punishment" even the death penalty would be for a guy who was allowed to live to age 89 in peace with the blood of 29,000 people on his hands. And Demjanjuk is pretty small potatoes when compared to the over 4000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died at the hands of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's warmongering based on ginned-up evidence garnered from torture. But as Reza Aslan noted on Bill Maher's show last weekend, the unfortunate reality is that the expenditure of political capital on prosecuting Bush and Cheney will mean the sacrifice of everything else on the Obama agenda. And the fact of the matter is that we are a nation of sniveling little rat-faced gits, ignorant of history and context, who have spent the last eight years watching 24 and thinking it's real and that torture is necessary and good and that it works. Geneva Conventions? Why should we listening to a bunch of chocolatiers and watchmakers? That's the American pulse, because the only law and order we care about in this country is when it involves black men daring to drive.