Of Thursday's Two "Face-off" Speeches, Only One Matters

The president said in his speech Thursday that security should not be a "wedge issue", yet Republicans are intent on making it just that. Typically enough, the former vice president, sarcastic and mean-spirited as ever, opened his remarks by saying that obviously the president had served in the Senate not the House where a five-minute rule is observed. Apparently Mr. Cheney had grown impatient waiting for the president to finish before beginning his standard defense of the previous administration's murky performance as our protector.

We've heard it all before and it doesn't bear repeating that the Bush-Cheney team kept us safe, and waterboarding was only used on three suspects. The multiple times it was used on the same suspects and other forms of extreme interrogation methods are usually ignored. Cheney's constant repetition of facts in question, for example, that "thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives were saved" due to their efforts is ludicrous and unprovable. And his claim that the Trade Center attack in '93 was treated only as a criminal matter, "case closed" is an absurdity that insults the intelligence of anyone who delves even slightly beyond gossipy, political rhetoric.

In fact, in the early days of the Bush administration, some insiders said Clinton was "obsessing about terrorism" and disregarded his warnings about the need for vigilance and strategies to combat the terrorist threat. It is a popular gambit employed by the conservative media and people like Cheney to suggest that little was known about Al Qaeda until, under their brilliant tutelage and the efforts of the CIA on their watch, a whole new world opened up to inform their approach to the nation's security interests.

In reality Al Qaeda was formed in the late 1980s and was in full blush during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. If anyone cared enough to look, its designs were clearly articulated in those early years. In a New Yorker article (6/2/08) Lawrence Wright wrote: "After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan ... most members of Al Jihad relocated to Sudan where bin Laden, who had fled Saudi Arabia after falling out with the royal family, had set up operations." Once it was clear how deeply involved Al Qaeda was in the Middle East some serious homework on the part of the new administration could have alerted the caretakers of our security to the dangers lurking there.

Never over-imbued with facts, however, columnist Charles Krauthammer claims 'we knew nothing about Al Qaeda' before 9/11, and intellectual lightweight Joe Scarborough, castigating Nancy Pelosi for comments about what members of Congress were told by the CIA, said 'I know more about this stuff (intelligence agency work) than most people.' Similarly, MSNBC anchor, Contessa Brewer, angrily told a guest she knew "all about" some topic because she used to work on The Hill. Honestly, some of these people seem to be in a contest to find a place at Fox News alongside Krauthammer.

An example of just how silly but also how callous some of today's conservative voices are, Ronald Kessler, chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com, on a recent Washington Journal, defended the Bush position that, because combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't wear uniforms, they weren't protected by the Geneva Conventions. It is remarkable that just being a member of the human race isn't an important consideration for people like Kessler. And, in one of the right's seemingly endless supply of idiotic flights into bizarroland he generalized that the reckless behavior of New Jersey's Democratic Governor Corzine for riding at high speed on the New Jersey Turnpike, without wearing a seat belt, typified Democratic Party recklessness across the board. This guy actually writes books too.

Republican Party Chair Michael Steele says his is the party of "ideals and ideas," although the accuracy of that statement isn't readily apparent. Mr. Cheney proved as much in his speech Thursday, reentering the capricious world he and his minions cooked up during the Bush years. His regurgitation of the familiar inflammatory rhetoric to scare Americans with the prospect of attacks by "nuclear-armed terrorists" on our homeland marked an ongoing commitment to the perverse tactics of our not-so-distant past.

The question of the day may be why Mr. Cheney keeps being provided a platform for positions that have so recently failed the smell test and why he appears to be considered an equivalent and acceptable counterforce to the current president.