"No Regrets" DCCC ad.

Democrats don't have a great deal of record to run on, but who needs it when the opposition record is so ... well, let Dick Cheney speak for himself.

Now, you might well think this has been taken out of context to unfairly represent the Veep's nuanced statement.

Alas, no. I recall the interview, and I nearly swallowed my mustache. He really has no regrets and he really said that knowing what he knows now, he'd do nothing differently.

No guarding priceless Iraqi treasures - or ammunition dumps - or records of who held what oil lease at the Oil Ministry. No regrets on sending our troops in underequipped and unarmored, with little training in urban conflict. It's all some sort of regrettable necessity. How could we expect them to do better? What godlike foreknowledge did we expect of them, to think that unsecured explosives might end up in the wrong hands? Goodness!

I wonder if Cheney is on Oxycontin, or perhaps powerful hallucinogens when he says things like that. Perhaps he is channeling the ghost of Mao, for whom the word of a Political officer well grounded in The Dialectic was inherently superior to the bourgeois practicality of an experienced field commander.

Even given the most perfect outcome to a war, how in hell could you have NO REGRETS at sending young men and women off to kill and be killed, to maim and be maimed? What kind of arrogant bastard has NO REGRETS about starting a war?

Well, other than people like Phillip the Second of Spain, or perhaps a Borgia Pope; it is a common affliction of both the religious fanatic and the willfully evil sort that exploits the faith of their supporters.

Don't you think you ought to go for a stroll in Arlington National Cemetery, Mr. Cheney? It's no less than what is expected of any wartime President.

tag: DCCC, No Regrets, Political Ads, Dick Cheney, Republican House Members, war on terror, terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, theoconservatives, theocons, Iraq, military intelligence review