Dick Cheney, Demented King

Robert Scheer commemorates 9/11 by asking what would have happened if Manhattan had been nuked.

WHO: Robert Scheer

AKA: Author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America, editor-in-chief of Truthdig

WHERE: The Nation

THESIS: Many worse things have happened than September 11th

LENGTH: 953 words

CHENEY'S ACTIVITIES AFTER HYPOTHETICAL NUCLEAR ATTACK: Become demented king, destroy last vestiges of rule of law, reduce number of free souls

TRAGEDIES COMPARED TO 9/11: The Holocaust, Vietnam War, bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

AMERICAN RETALIATION FOR EYE POKING: Poke out tens of thousands of others' eyes

THE LAST WORD:

Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn't compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima's mayor two years ago: "That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast--silence--hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted."

We assumed that the Japanese people would readily forgive us and, having been raised in the spirit of total obedience to their emperor, they accommodated our occupation quite well, even injecting industrial-grade silicon into their women's breasts to satisfy the erotic appetites of our soldiers.