But it was stuff we heard before. He still likes to cast the post-9/11--let's just call it the "9/12", if Beck doesn't have that copyrighted--world as being a place where Saddam Hussein had connections to terrorists and nukes were totally on the open market for bad guys everywhere, and of course, the "enhanced interrogation techniques" kept us safe, and they aren't either torture, so stop saying that!
In other words, Cheney invited us into his nowhere land, where, as the nowhere man, he made nowhere plans for nobody. Because, um, there wasn't a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, there might've been a nuke source out of Pakistan (A Q Khan) but that got busted up, kind of, no thanks to Cheney, since Brewster Jennings got outed since he was miffed that somebody wanted to break up his Niger yellowcake fantasy. And of course, it really isn't self-righteous for anyone who cares about the rule of law to point out that "enhanced interrogation techniques" is just a "rebranding" of torture. It's what we call a "euphemism."
But Cheney already knows that word, doesn't he? Because he thinks that's what people are using now, to minimize the bogeyman he saw around every corner.
Colonel Wilkerson is right. This speech proves him right. Cheney is a fearful man.
There are going to be people who say Cheney schooled Obama in how grown-ups do foreign policy, but basically, those people know shit. What this was about was a kind of insanity that's been allowed to thrive in the fertile bullshit of our national dialogue, and had been watered with the neck-sweat of chicken-hawks and the tears of maudlin scairdy-cats. That the Dick can still juxtapose terror and Iraq, and can still justify torture--even while admitting that covering up incendiary photos of the same is in the national interest, is putrid. That he isn't called out by the mainstream media, and that, heartily, is a pity.
That leaves it to bloggers. So let me break it down:
Cheney wants to front like Obama stopping the alleged enhanced interrogation techniques is somehow dangerous (no, but weren't they stopped under the Bush Administration not long after the 2004 election?) and that closing Guantanamo is also very bad (as if we didn't have prisons in America--lots of prisons). He ignores the Boumediene problem regarding holding and trying these people. He leaves out that we haven't always picked up the guilty. He means to hold safety as being nobler than his oath...of....office.
That's something Obama mentioned today--his oath of office. I think he's being too desultory in acting on the changes I voted him in for, but I think he believes in the Constitution and the law. He reminded us in his speech, that he was not the only one in Washington, DC who took such an oath.
Cheney reminded me again that there was a recent administration that saw the Constitution as "just a goddamn piece of paper." He publicly wiped himself with it, today.
More people could be more concerned, you think?
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