When you do an image search on The Google for Dick Cheney, 50 percent of the results are pictures of him snarling. One of them has his face superimposed on a machine gun-wielding Terminator, and another shows him barring fangs and with demonic red eyes.
It seems a lot of people on the Internet are not fond of the former Vice-President. And, since that's where we get our pictures please don't e-mail us and say that we only put up pictures of people when they look bad. It's not our fault that Dick Cheney appears to, A) Have an aversion to happiness, B) Want to destroy humankind after receiving a robot makeover from Skynet, and C) Be the opposite of all the literary "good" vampires that teenagers are obsessed with these days.
SIDENOTE: There's, like, half a million books for young adults about vampires in your local bookseller. What's the deal with the kids and the undead?
Anyway...we here at MEvBLOG don't understand why Cheney is out and about these days delivering speeches on safety and torture and Gitmo (Oh my!), and seems to be more accessible now than when he was our VP. Plus, he's also trotted out his daughter - not the one who's openly gay, but the one who's married with five kids - to schill on his behalf on the talk show circuit.
The message from both Original Cheney and Cheney 2.0 - is that President Obama is making American more dangerous by ending practices like "enhanced interrogation" - which Congress actually outlawed in 1994 anyway - and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
In a great column, Leonard Pitts writes that other than Gitmo and ending torture - which, again, was already against the law - Obama hasn't really done away with much else. A few policies have been tweaked, but for the most part he's kept everything Bush/Cheney had in place.
Pitt also points out that Cheney's continuous assertion of American being safer because there wasn't another attack on America when Bush was in office is kinda ridiculous. He writes that Pitt's arguement is "a non sequitur dressed up as logic," and points out that after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing Clinton also didn't see another attack while in office. So...why isn't Cheney praising him in the same way?
To us, Cheney's exposure and assertions seem like political posturing that hurts both Republicans and the current administration. He comes across like a bitter old grump and is sidetracking Obama and his team from, you know, ACTUALLY working to make the country safer.
Another theory is that he shot someone in the face again and is trying to exhaust the limelight before anyone finds out. We're on the fence here. What do you think?
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Cheney Game
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8 comments:
The only positive thing i can say about Cheney poking his head out of the deer lease is that him running in 2012 might well guarantee another GOP defeat. i cant help thinking about the ben franklin quote that goes something like 'those that would sacrifice liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.'
RE: Anonymous 12:26
Interesting. Too bad Ben Franklin isn't alive today. He'd kill on "Meet the Press."
First off, I'll say that I don't like it when previous administrations take shots at the current administration. I didn't like it when Clinton, Gore and Carter all to shots at W and I don't care for it when Cheney does it to Obama (even though I agree with him). Its seem to lack class.
As I said, I agree with Cheney. Maybe, somebody can explain how closing Gitmo and stopping "enhanced" interrogation techniques makes us more safe. What is so wrong with "enhanced" interrogation techniques or even torture? It easy to take the high road and be against it but if you had one suspect that had critical information about a immanent attack on building that was going to kill hundreds of Americans. Who in their right mind wouldn't order it? If you still say no and that we need to be above torture, pretend your mom or daughter/son is in that building.
Oh! I feel so safe when Obama dropped charges against the mastermind behind the USS Cole. Or, how about when he was going to take action against N. Korea from firing a missle. Or what about their bomb. And what's going to happen when they attack South Korea. We'll probably sit around the bon fire and sing Kum Ba Ya.
We should leave the intelligence community alone and let them do their work. At the very best, it's a dirty business. All of this criticism and exposure is helping our enemies - it garners sympathy for them while they continue to mistreat our people much worse than the terrorists at Gitmo are treated.
RE: hunterjck
It's important to ask these questions so me make sure our intelligence community can do their job. I don't know any part of the government that can't use some sort of accountability.
Three good reasons America should not torture:
1) Asking our boys to die for American values should mean something: they are not political playthings, but red-blooded Americans who stand for the best our country represents. These values do not include torture: see WWII war crimes: Japanese, German POW abuse, and USA instistence on Geneva Convention updates and prosecutions.
2) If we torture, they will torture our boys. Keep the moral high ground, for our soldiers' sake.
3) There is no proof it works reliably, anyway.
RE: PJ
All good reasons, I think.
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