* Cheney lambasted Obama for treating the latest incident as a legal matter. What he didn't mention is that the Bush people did exactly the same thing with Reid, and then bragged about the conviction they got in the courts.
* Cheney lied (yeah, really!) both outrageously and ridiculously when he said that Obama is trying to pretend the country is not at war. Obama has been saying that the country is at war since at least when he was a state senator. He said it throughout last year as president beginning with his inaugural address: "Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred" and he said it throughout the year prior as a candidate. He typically doesn't use the "war on terror' construction when he talks about it, but presumably that's because he realizes it's an idiotic phrase.
* Somehow, as well, the folks who want you to believe that Obama is afraid to really fight a war also want you not to notice that he just announced his second major escalation of the what would you call it? the thingy in Afghanistan that involves lots of soldiers and weapons and blood and people dying. This little bit of attempted legerdemain is not exactly shocking anymore, is it? The day that cognitive dissonance goes out of fashion is the day there are no more conservatives.
* Another thing Cheney probably doesn't want you to know is that some of the folks who probably plotted the attack in Yemen were actually released from Guantà �namo by ... oops, the Bush administration. Yeah, Bushco sent some of them to Saudi Arabia to participate in an "art therapy rehabilitation program". You think I'm making that up, don't you?
* I'm also pretty sure that Cheney won't be mentioning who set up the anti-terrorist national security system that failed so miserably to put the pieces together on Abdulmutallab last week. Remind me again, which administration was in office for most of the last decade? Which one reshuffled the bureaucratic architecture to make the system work properly after the 9/11 debacle?
* Of course, perhaps that wasn't the problem. Maybe the thing was that the system works fine, as long as someone is in charge. There actually is a nominee to lead TSA who has been readily approved by two Senate committees, but has had his nomination process stopped dead by that radical left-wing friend of Muslim terrorists, Jim DeMint, of South Carolina. Funny, you don't hear a lot about that from Cheney and his clones. So why is this critical nomination being held up? DeMint is waiting for a promise that TSA workers won't be allowed to unionize. And, really, that makes sense, if you think about it. Gotta keep our priorities straight, folks! Can't have the worker bees earning a respectable wage now, can we?
* The last thing that probably isn't going to get a lot of mention is the fact that the worst foreign terrorist attack in history was sustained on the watch of wait for it now a certain team known as the Bush-Cheney administration. Not only that, but in fact the only such attack of major proportions was during their presidency. And not only that, but there is a huge raft of evidence including the testimony of their own top terrorism and intelligence people that they didn't give a crap about it while the warning bells were ringing at 120 decibels.
Whew. Can I stop now?
The point of all this is that the radical right's arguments about national security this week are entirely absurd, and that's on a good day. Most of the rest of the time they are completely contradictory and utterly hypocritical.
But this kind of thing goes on all the time. Obama is labeled a big spender for trying to use Keynesian tactics to rescue the economy from the disaster bequeathed us by a regressive goon who doubled the size of the national debt in just eight years. Democrats are called socialists for adding 35 million instant coerced customers to private insurance rolls, rather than creating a public healthcare plan, like just about every other developed country in the world. Obama is supposedly weak on national defense, according to the folks who ran two wars against third world countries right out of the tenth century, and succeeded in getting nowhere almost a decade later, while the US military is spent and the national treasury depleted.
It's unreal. But worst of all, this stuff actually gets traction. Loads of it. Tens of millions of Americans swallow it whole, and many more are added to the ranks every day.
These are the wages of wimpiness. These are the perils of passivity.
This should never have happened, and a year ago it would have seemed almost inconceivable to anyone (except those actually familiar with the Democratic Party of the last generation or two). Even so, it is absolutely astonishing that these punks don't realize the imperative of throwing punches, of naming enemies, of framing a narrative. All the more so because this is not a case of politics for politics' sake. I couldn't care less about the Democratic Party, other than wishing that most of them rot in Hell. However, they are the "opposition' to the full-on nightmare scenario, and we're semi-stuck with them as the would-be voice of sanity.
My god, though, if you can't trash George W. Bush after this last decade, if you can't demonize Wall Street bankers who learned greed by stealing marbles from other kids in kindergarten, if you can't remind voters of what cowards Cheney and the chickenhawk chorus actually are when the hell can you do it?
Democrats are inept, the public knows it, and that will be a major part of their undoing in the next two election cycles.
But the other part of what will get them is that they'll absolutely let anyone say anything about them, and just take it.
* Cheney lied (yeah, really!) both outrageously and ridiculously when he said that Obama is trying to pretend the country is not at war. Obama has been saying that the country is at war since at least when he was a state senator. He said it throughout last year as president beginning with his inaugural address: "Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred" and he said it throughout the year prior as a candidate. He typically doesn't use the "war on terror' construction when he talks about it, but presumably that's because he realizes it's an idiotic phrase.
* Somehow, as well, the folks who want you to believe that Obama is afraid to really fight a war also want you not to notice that he just announced his second major escalation of the what would you call it? the thingy in Afghanistan that involves lots of soldiers and weapons and blood and people dying. This little bit of attempted legerdemain is not exactly shocking anymore, is it? The day that cognitive dissonance goes out of fashion is the day there are no more conservatives.
* Another thing Cheney probably doesn't want you to know is that some of the folks who probably plotted the attack in Yemen were actually released from Guantà �namo by ... oops, the Bush administration. Yeah, Bushco sent some of them to Saudi Arabia to participate in an "art therapy rehabilitation program". You think I'm making that up, don't you?
* Of course, perhaps that wasn't the problem. Maybe the thing was that the system works fine, as long as someone is in charge. There actually is a nominee to lead TSA who has been readily approved by two Senate committees, but has had his nomination process stopped dead by that radical left-wing friend of Muslim terrorists, Jim DeMint, of South Carolina. Funny, you don't hear a lot about that from Cheney and his clones. So why is this critical nomination being held up? DeMint is waiting for a promise that TSA workers won't be allowed to unionize. And, really, that makes sense, if you think about it. Gotta keep our priorities straight, folks! Can't have the worker bees earning a respectable wage now, can we?
* The last thing that probably isn't going to get a lot of mention is the fact that the worst foreign terrorist attack in history was sustained on the watch of wait for it now a certain team known as the Bush-Cheney administration. Not only that, but in fact the only such attack of major proportions was during their presidency. And not only that, but there is a huge raft of evidence including the testimony of their own top terrorism and intelligence people that they didn't give a crap about it while the warning bells were ringing at 120 decibels.
Whew. Can I stop now?
The point of all this is that the radical right's arguments about national security this week are entirely absurd, and that's on a good day. Most of the rest of the time they are completely contradictory and utterly hypocritical.
But this kind of thing goes on all the time. Obama is labeled a big spender for trying to use Keynesian tactics to rescue the economy from the disaster bequeathed us by a regressive goon who doubled the size of the national debt in just eight years. Democrats are called socialists for adding 35 million instant coerced customers to private insurance rolls, rather than creating a public healthcare plan, like just about every other developed country in the world. Obama is supposedly weak on national defense, according to the folks who ran two wars against third world countries right out of the tenth century, and succeeded in getting nowhere almost a decade later, while the US military is spent and the national treasury depleted.
It's unreal. But worst of all, this stuff actually gets traction. Loads of it. Tens of millions of Americans swallow it whole, and many more are added to the ranks every day.
These are the wages of wimpiness. These are the perils of passivity.
This should never have happened, and a year ago it would have seemed almost inconceivable to anyone (except those actually familiar with the Democratic Party of the last generation or two). Even so, it is absolutely astonishing that these punks don't realize the imperative of throwing punches, of naming enemies, of framing a narrative. All the more so because this is not a case of politics for politics' sake. I couldn't care less about the Democratic Party, other than wishing that most of them rot in Hell. However, they are the "opposition' to the full-on nightmare scenario, and we're semi-stuck with them as the would-be voice of sanity.
My god, though, if you can't trash George W. Bush after this last decade, if you can't demonize Wall Street bankers who learned greed by stealing marbles from other kids in kindergarten, if you can't remind voters of what cowards Cheney and the chickenhawk chorus actually are when the hell can you do it?
Democrats are inept, the public knows it, and that will be a major part of their undoing in the next two election cycles.
But the other part of what will get them is that they'll absolutely let anyone say anything about them, and just take it.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
