Bloodthirsty Liberal

Let me put this as succinctly as I can:

To elaborate:

Dick Cheney is not the most popular of politicians, but when he offered a harsh assessment of the Obama Administration’s approach to terrorism last May, his criticism stung—so much that the President gave a speech the same day that was widely seen as a direct response. Though neither man would admit it, eight months later political and security realities are forcing Mr. Obama’s antiterror policies ever-closer to the former Vice President’s.

In fact, the President’s changes in antiterror policy have never been as dramatic as he or his critics have advertised. His supporters on the left have repeatedly howled when the Justice Department quietly went to court and offered the same legal arguments the Bush Administration made, among them that the President has the power to detain enemy combatants indefinitely without charge. He has also ramped up drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban operatives in Pakistan.

However, the Administration has tried to break from its predecessors on several big antiterror issues, and it is on those that it is suffering the humiliation of having to walk back from its own righteous declarations. This is Dick Cheney’s revenge.

And as he is probably too busy shooting defenseless little furry creatures (deer, not hippies—although now that you mention it…), let me respond in his stead.

Ahem.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Boy, it sure must suck to have to adopt the policies of someone you find the most evil entity to walk the earth since Rasputin last pulled the wings off a fly.

It would be like me having to admit Al Gore was right. As if.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gitmo, KSM’s trial—the administration has thrown its policies into reverse so many times, they’ve stripped the gears.

As long as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were responsible for keeping Americans safe, Democrats could pander to the U.S. and European left’s anti-antiterror views at little political cost. But now that they are responsible, American voters are able to see what the left really has in mind, and they are saying loud and clear that they prefer the Cheney method.

Mr. Holder has nonetheless begun a campaign to defend his decisions on Abdulmutallab and KSM, telling the New Yorker last week that “I don’t apologize for what I’ve done” and that trying KSM in a civilian court will be “the defining event of my time as Attorney General.”

That’s about the only thing he’s said I agree with.

Did you know:

Much has been made of President Obama pitching and putting his way around Hawaii for nearly three days before commenting publicly on the Flight 253 terrorist attack. No doubt the president’s time on the links made for bad optics (an observation that predates the Christmas Day plot, by the way; last month, no less august a chronicler of liberal miserabilism than Harper’s Index noted that in the first year of his presidency, Obama had already exceeded the number of holes played by George W. Bush during his two terms in office).

Did you get that? Obama has played more golf in one year (really, more like seven months, when you consider he took office in the middle of winter) than Bush did in eight? That’s a whole hell (hole-hell?) of a lot of golf.

But the difference between Bush and Obama is that after Bush left the golf course he oversaw an unprecedented global war on terror that put serious dents in jihadist causes from Buffalo to the Philippines, and forestalled attacks on American soil for eight years.

What, exactly, has Mr. Obama done so far besides make it unlawful for passengers to use the lavatory at the end of a long flight?

Well, he… he… uh…. He wished Muslims a happy ramadan, didn’t he? That helped, I’m sure. What about all those salaam alaikums he bestowed upon them? And bullying Israel? Didn’t any of that buy us some security?

Somewhere in an undisclosed location, Dick Cheney is laughing:

Hey, Barack! Tell them about the previous eight years now, why don’t ya?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted sky bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term “war on terror” and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe,” Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. “Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society.”

When Vice President Cheney accused President Obama of “dithering” over Afghanistan, people were justifiably outraged.

I say justifiably because dither is not the appropriate word to use in the case of a president weighing his options in matters of life and death.

Dillydally is the mot juste:

Anthony Zinni stepped up his call for the Obama administration to quit dillydallying and send more troops to Afghanistan to fight the insurgency.

A counterinsurgency strategy, he said, would work better over the long run than continuing narrower counterterrorism operations that target Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.

The retired Marine Corps general, who had been the top commander in the Middle East and Central Asia, said the Obama administration needs more forces in Afghanistan quickly. Zinni said his own son was among the troops waiting to be deployed, adding: “I think that we owe them a decision. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why we’re still waiting for one.”

Zinni, who spent considerable time working with the Pakistani and Indian governments while he headed Centcom during the Clinton administration, told the International Peace Operations Association’s annual conference that a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan could better resolve the nettlesome problems with Taliban and al Qaeda fighters and drug production. The association is a trade group for battlefield contractors; Zinni is chairman of BAE Systems Inc., the U.K. defense giant’s U.S. arm.

…

This time, Zinni had some specific advice President Barack Obama: Americans need to hear a better explanation of why the U.S. is in Afghanistan, on the doorstep of nuclear-armed rivals Pakistan and India neighbors. “I think the speech that has been missing … is this talk not only to the American public but to the world about what the threats are, what the challenges are and what the concerns should be out there,” he said.

Dear God, not another speech! Anything but that!

Now, Zinni has a history of telling president what to do, sometimes criticizing them for doing too much, here too little.

But when he blasted Bush on Iraq, he was a household name, a published author. This comment is barely audible.

While Obama is letting I dare not wait upon I would like the poor cat i’ the adage, the Taliban know If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly:

Eight American troops were killed in two separate bomb attacks Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, making October the deadliest month of the war for U.S. forces since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban.

The president has said… well, let’s get it from the horse’s a—mouth, horse’s mouth:

“While I will never hesitate to use force to protect the American people or our vital interests, I also promise you this — and this is very important as we consider our next steps in Afghanistan: I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm’s way,” Obama said Monday during a visit to Naval Air Station Jacksonville. “I won’t risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary.”

Okay, okay, take your time. A stitch in time, measure twice, folls rush in, and all that. But can you maybe hesitate a little less and rush a little more?

I won’t use coffins of American servicemen as some kind of prop to stage my little plays—leave that to Code Pink, Jack Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, and other despicable members of the Democratic Party. But I will wonder aloud what the hell this nimrod thinks he’s doing.

He told us he had a cunning plan back in March!

No, I’ll leave it to others who know better to hold the president accountable:

A key U.S. official in Afghanistan has resigned in protest over U.S. policy in the war-torn region, as the Obama administration deliberates its future strategy there.

Matthew Hoh, a political officer in the foreign service and a senior civilian officer in Zabul, Afghanistan, wrote a four-page letter to Ambassador Nancy Powell, director general of the foreign service at the State Department, to express his “doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy,” as first reported by the Washington Post today.

“To put simply, I fail to see the value or the worth in the continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war,” the former Marine wrote in the emotional letter.

Hoh spent six years in Iraq, where he served as a Marine Corps captain and then as a civilian for the Department of Defense.

The 36-year-old told the Washington Post he decided to speak out publicly because “I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is right.’”

(202) 224-3121

Vice President Cheney kindly offers a valuable lesson to President Obama, one that His Worship would have learned on the playgrounds of his youth if he had been born in America—kidding!—don’t start what you can’t finish.

He’s finished, all right:

“Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.

“In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision – a good one, I think – and sent a commander into the field to implement it.

“Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced. It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.”

Now, that’s all true. Facts even a code-pinker couldn’t dispute.

But there are more facts that make President Obama’s craven behavior even more despicable:

IT WAS ONLY last March 27 that President Obama outlined in a major speech what he called “a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan” that, he added, “marks the conclusion of a careful policy review.” That strategy unambiguously stated that the United States would prevent the return of a Taliban government and “enhance the military, governance and economic capacity” of the country. We strongly supported the president’s conclusion that those goals were essential to preventing another attack on the United States by al-Qaeda and its extremist allies.

…

It’s hard to see, however, how Mr. Obama can refute the analysis he offered last March. “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged,” he said then, “that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.” Afghanistan, he continued, “is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan,” where al-Qaeda and the Taliban now aim at seizing control of a state that possesses nuclear weapons. Moreover, Mr. Obama said, “a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance . . . and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people — especially women and girls.”

Seven months ago, he told us he had the answer, one that “marks the conclusion of a careful policy review.” Now, he doesn’t—and he still wants to blame the Bush administration, 10 months after they decamped and almost a full year after he knew he was going to be president and have to deal with this s**t??

Is he [bleeping] kidding?

Pencils down. You’ve either passed the test or you’ve failed it. But copying from another boy, and then complaining because he got the answer wrong is not a successful strategy.

Obama’s team always makes this announcements on the weekend

They realize that the young O-bots are sleeping in, nursing hangovers.

The U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is unlikely to close by the Obama administration’s deadline of January 2010, two senior administration officials said late Friday.

They cited legal complications for the delay, but said they were still optimistic about shutting the detention facility for terrorism suspects soon.

The announcement represents a blow to the president, who signed an executive order and set the deadline with great fanfare during his first week in office.

During a signing ceremony at the White House on January 22, Obama reaffirmed his inauguration pledge that the United States does not have “to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

The president said he was issuing the order to close the prison camp in order to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism.”

The delay may provide fodder for Republicans such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has argued that shutting the Guantanamo prison would make the United States less safe. He said Obama should have had a detailed plan in place before signing the order.

There are empty houses and apartments in Colorado, Illinois, Texas and North Carolina, homes of the recent terror arrestees (no such word, but you get the idea). We shouldn’t have to make any false choices between our safety and our Constitution, right? I’m sure the neighbors will understand.

- Aggie

Very interesting

The editors wanted to portray Dick Cheney as a “butcher” and so they cropped a family photograph. Check out both versions and read what the photographer has to say. I don’t know how to reproduce the images here, but go to the link and click on them both. It happens every day in the media:

[David Hume Kennerly is a former contributing editor of Newsweek. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his photographs of the Vietnam War. A response from Newsweek follows immediately below.]

The Sept. 14th Newsweek cover line — “Is Your Baby Racist?” — should have included a sub-head, “Is Dick Cheney a Butcher?”

Featured inside the magazine was a full-page, stand-alone picture of former Vice President Dick Cheney, knife in hand, leaning over a bloody carving board. Newsweek used it to illustrate a quote that he made about C.I.A. interrogators. By linking that photo with Mr. Cheney’s comment and giving it such prominence, they implied something sinister, macabre, or even evil was going on there.

I took that photograph at his daughter Liz’s home during a two-day assignment, and was shocked by its usage. The meat on the cutting board wasn’t the only thing butchered. In fact, Newsweek chose to crop out two-thirds of the original photograph, which showed Mrs. Cheney, both of their daughters, and one of their grandchildren, who were also in the kitchen, getting ready for a simple family dinner.

However, Newsweek’s objective in running the cropped version was to illustrate its editorial point of view, which could only have been done by shifting the content of the image so that readers just saw what the editors wanted them to see. This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

Photojournalists fight the credibility battle every day, from combating digitally faked photos to being lumped in with the paparazzi, a group of camera-carrying cretins who have no respect for anything, particularly the people they hound. In the case of my Cheney photo, Newsweek is guilty not just of blurring but of blowing up that line between tabloid-style sensationalism and honest photojournalism.

This incident is another example of why many people don’t believe what they see or read. And America clearly notices these shifts in journalism. This week, the respected Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a poll stating that nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed believe that news stories are inaccurate and biased — 25 years ago, the number was half that.

We photojournalists have a long and storied tradition of striving for objectivity. Many of my colleagues have died flying that banner. I consider myself as much historian as photographer, having spent a 40-year career endeavoring to make photographs that inform, not misinform. My heroes are the likes of Joe Rosenthal, who photographed the Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima; Eddie Adams, whose photo of a South Vietnamese police officer shooting a Viet Cong suspect changed the course of a war; and countless others who have hung their lives out to capture the facts through the lens of a camera. Their photos have provided a raw and unflinching view of the world and have contributed to a free society’s understanding of sometimes harsh reality.

The advent of digital photography and the proliferation of instant images have dulled the power of historical photos against the steady and relentless 24-hour drumbeat of the “breaking story” syndrome, which holds publications and networks hostage to the relentless demands of feeding the News Monster. It doesn’t help to have the photos misrepresented on top of that.

However, I still believe in the power of the image to empower, embolden and inspire. Photojournalists, editors and writers must continue the struggle to turn their trained minds and eyes to telling and showing the truth, and holding that quivering line of credibility against what is beginning to feel like insurmountable odds.

Here is the Newsweek editor’s response:

We doubt any reasonable reader would, in David’s phrase, think something “sinister, macabre, or even evil” was going on in that image as presented. Yes, the picture has been cropped, an accepted practice of photographers, editors and designers since the invention of the medium. We cropped the photograph using editorial judgment to show the most interesting part of it. Is it a picture of the former vice president cutting meat? Yes, it is. Has it been altered? No. Did we use the image to make an editorial point — in this case, about the former vice president’s red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defense of his views and values? Yes, we did.

In other words, they hate him and want to portray him as a butcher.

What the photographer has to say here is true. The full picture “humanizes” Dick Cheney by putting him in the context of his extended family in a homey setting. It creates “nuance”. The media hates nuance unless it is applied to a liberal criminal who needs a hand. John Kerry cried for nuance when we lambasted him for testilying to the Senate that US soldiers committed beheadings in Viet Nam. America didn’t care for the vicious slander and the media pled for “nuance”. The media hates Cheney and has spent the past eight or nine years portraying him as a monster in one way or the other. They can flutter their eyelashes and claim innocence all day long; the photo was a set-up and it made the photographer look bad. The particular photojournalist has redeemed himself but he is quite correct; the entire field of journalism, including photojournalism is damaged.

- Aggie

Dick Cheney comments on Obama administration

The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002. The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by al Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States. The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions. President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

- Aggie

Hey, Leon Panetta, why don’t you stick your big beak into what’s going on in Iran, instead of QUESTIONING THE PATRIOTISM of a former Vice President of the United States of America:

Vice President Cheney on Monday hit back at CIA Director Leon Panetta over his suggestion that Cheney wants another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

“I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted,” said Cheney in a statement provided to The Hill. “The important thing is whether or not the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years.”

Panetta, a veteran politician who served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, had criticized Cheney for “gallows politics” and said the former vice president hoped the country were subjected to another terrorist attack.

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” Panetta told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

“It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

I despise those liberals who can’t stay on topic and have a civil debate. Cheney told you what he thought—he held nothing back. So why put such a disparaging spin on his motives? Debate him on the issues if you disagree. It’s a cheap, ad hominem, personal attack.

For something like this to emanate from the mouth of the Director of the Agency is way, way, way out of line.

I’m serious about Iran, btw. They didn’t see the revolution coming 30 years ago, and they didn’t see this big fat mess coming. (Else why would they let President Obama say this: “We are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran.” D’oh!) Do your effing job, Panetta.

John Kerry would cry like a little girl about questioning his patriotism if you so much as offered him a breath mint. Questioning patriotism would seem to be all this crew has to offer in the “robust debate” over national security.

Are you sitting down, leftists?

No, really. You’re going to want to sit down:

Looks like former Vice President Dick Cheney and most Republicans don’t see eye-to-eye on the issue of same-sex marriage. [Not to mention Obama! ed.]

Speaking at the National Press Club, Cheney said he’s not against gay marriage.

“I think freedom means freedom for everyone,” he said in remarks posted on the newspaper’s Web site.

“People ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”

Cheney’s daughter is gay, with the former veep saying the issue should be left up to individual states rather than the federal government.

“The question of whether or not there ought to be a general statute that governs this I don’t support,” he said. “I do believe, historically, the way marriage has been regulated is at a state level. It’s always been a state issue, and I think that’s the way it ought to be handled today.”

Since Dick Cheney has been so courageous, I will be too: I love him.

Love. And that’s okay in my state.

Too bad President Obama is so Stone Age on this subject. Hating on homos is just so 1950s.

Say what they will about Dick Cheney—and they do—the lactating liberals of the loony left respond with everything but… well, a response.

They call him names:

It appears CBS News’s Chief Legal Analyst doesn’t agree with his colleague Bob Schieffer that former Vice President Dick Cheney is winning the national security debate with Barack Obama.

Quite the contrary, Andrew Cohen thinks Cheney is still living in “the world of September 11, 2001, a world where hijacked planes are screaming toward their targets, chaos reigns, and anything goes.”

As a result, Cohen wondered in a Friday posting at his CBSNews.com blog “Court Watch” if Cheney is, “as many people say, just a d**k”.

Ha! I get it. He made a funny.

They question his mental health:

Neurotic, paranoid, false to fact and false to reason, forever self-rationalizing his inner rage at his own impotence, and failure dripping from every word, and as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane as any terrorist; the former vice president has today humiliated himself beyond redemption.

…

You saved no one, sir. If the classified documents you seek released really did detail plots other than those manufactured by drowning men in order to get it to stop, or if they truly did know plans beyond the laughable ones you and President Bush have already revealed, hijackers without passports, targeting a building whose name Mr. Bush could not remember, clowns who thought they could destroy airports by dropping matches in fuel pipelines 30 miles away, men who planned to attack a military base dressed as pizza delivery boys, forgetting that every man there was armed, and today, the four would-be synagogue bombers, one of whom turns out to keep bottles of urine in his apartment, and is on schizophrenia medicine.

If those documents contain anything of value, you would have leaked those already, as you leaked those revenge fantasies of the Library Tower and the JFK Bomber and the Ft. Dix Six.

Do you think Olbermann imagines himself wearing a powdered wig and striped trousers as he drops in that “sir”? How pompous. Someone should tell him that Cheney is probably not watching the show, not while there’s a moose hunting episode on Wild Kingdom somewhere on satellite TV.

But nice to know all terrorists are incompetent buffoons. Nothing to worry about.

That’s the tenor of the Times, where debate is pretty much reduced to denial:

It certainly didn’t quiet former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was fear-mongering in full force on Thursday.

That’s all the editorial board had to say about Cheney’s speech—buried in a paean to President Obama’s wisdom and prudence.

But the OpEd columnists had more to say—not always in their own words (hello Maureen!):

Besides, the question of what Pelosi knew or didn’t, or when she did or didn’t know, is irrelevant to how W. and Cheney broke the law and authorized torture.

…

Torture […] is designed to force the subject to submit “through humiliation and cruelty” and “see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain.”

It’s a good description of the bullying approach Cheney and Rummy applied to the globe, and the Arab world.

…

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

I side with Cheney, and I’m prepared to defend the position. But there’s little to say in response to nyah-nyah. Liberal commentators, it would seem, fit the classic description of the bully: tough and intimidating until you punch them in the nose. Then they blubber and sputter, and retreat to a safe distance to resume their taunting. In absence of any coherent response, the round goes to Cheney.