A devastating reaction roundup by Dan Froomkin to Dick Cheney's latest machinations.
White House Briefing -- News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration
By insinuating that the sizeable majority of American voters who oppose the war in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy, Vice President Cheney on Wednesday may have crossed the line that separates legitimate political discourse from hysteria.
Cheney's comments came in a highly unusual conference call with reporters, part of an extensively orchestrated and largely successful Republican effort to spin the obviously anti-Bush message of Ned Lamont's victory over presidential enabler Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary.
In making the case that Lieberman's defeat was actually an enormous boost for Republicans, the customarily furtive vice president let loose not with compelling argument, but unsupported invective.
Voters who supported Lamont's antiwar campaign in the Democratic primary were giving "the Al Qaeda types" exactly what they wanted, Cheney said. And as a result the Democratic Party, he asserted, now stands for a wholesale retreat in the broader campaign against terror.
For once, the MSM seems to be unimpressed.
The Trenton Times writes: "Leave it to Vice President Dick Cheney to turn the results of a fair and honest election into some kind of sinister scenario. . . .
"Actually, comments such as the above are more of a sad reflection on the state of the Bush-Cheney administration, which just doesn't get it. Americans are fed up with the war in Iraq, from the false pretense for going to war to the tragically inept handling of the effort after the fall of Baghdad. Meantime, terrorist groups continue to prowl and plot, as evidenced by last week's arrest of 24 terror suspects in London, while this country spends enormous resources and sheds the blood of so many brave Americans in a war that has no end in sight."
Frankly, the Administration has over promised and under delivered on every single important issue it has used reporters to peddle.
Over the last several years, I've watched usually fairly intelligent people contort themselves into knots trying to explain and justify what they assumed must - somehow - make sense. And now, one by one, reporter-by-reporter, editorialist-by-editorialist, the irrefutable truth has become apparent.
This administration exploits the honesty and the presumption of honor any proper president is due.
But then, some of us figured out that two entirely questionable elections have pretty much settled the matter that neither honesty nor honor were parts of the president-select's character or intent.
And that is the point where I realized that anyone presuming that the Administrations stated values would manifest in anything they might reasonably expect were doomed to disappointment.
As more and more policies proved to have the exact opposite effect to the stated intent, you would think more people would have picked up on this, but critical thinking is not a strong point of our public educational institutions and that has been the case for at least half a century, as a matter of policy.
Perhaps we need to rethink the amount of time we spend so carefully not thinking.
tag: dick cheney, politics, conference call, MSM, media reaction, ethics, george w. bush, iran, iraq, lies, constitution, constitutional, signing statements
No comments:
Post a Comment