Good News

It's the best news I've heard in a long time. Dick Cheney, who, as far as I can tell, has never been right about anything -- at least not when he was our de-facto leader -- has declared that Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

Hearing that, a sense of great relief took over my soul and, quenched by the cool water of my own certitude, was my thirst for optimism slaked. Nor was that sense at all diminished by the news that Dick was greeted as a hero by the assemblage at which he spoke those words. Wrong at its most anthropomorhic, the embodiment of failure most primal, once again a hero of the right. Bodes well for the good guys.

Dick

"We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the secret sits in the middle and knows."

That's what Robert Frost, who, in his later years, taught at my college while I was there, penned. I had to write an essay about it.

As Cheney flings another of his Peyronioid arrows at Obama for, in his sick view, not doing anything right about terrorists, news like this makes me think of that poem, and shake my head sadly.

Having gotten nothing right for the eight years of his presidency, having been easily lapped by the Obama administration in anti-terrorist successes, Dick still gets more air than Shaun White. And people believe him, think Obama doesn't get it, think the Dick did. What a pathetic people we are; how gullible, how easily misled; how hungrily we lap up the gruel spread before us by Foxdick, as long as it confirms our prejudices and doesn't require thought.

It's also worth noting that despite the Dickish invective, the administration kept mum on this success, in order that the intelligence gathered therefrom could be used. This is in contrast to the Cheney administrations trotting out every action ASAP, sometimes to the detriment of possible operations.

The president we need, to fix the universal destruction left behind by President Cheney: we have him, and we're being lied to at every turn by cynical people who want to stop him, and whose discredited ideas got us there in the first place. And somehow, it's working. We have a collective memory the length of the last disinformation show on Fox. Read the comments on this blog: it couldn't be clearer.

You'd think being right would be enough. But, since the wrong is killing us, it's not. I can't stand it.

On Further Review

Following up on yesterday's posts: the reviews are coming in and there seems general agreement among those with eyes and ears and matter behind/between them that Cheney's speech was, at best, the same old sh*t, and, at worst, full of omissions, lies, and distortions. (Which, of course, is the same old sh*t. So I repeat myself.) Not everyone loved Obama's, naturally; some civil libertarians were disappointed, and the RWS™, unsurprisingly, were unable to process such depth and thoughtfulness at all. But there weren't lies.

Giving Cheney the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume that 9/11 scared the crap out of him. How terrifying must it have been -- especially for a guy who (unlike me) managed five deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam -- to sit in a bunker somewhere not knowing what was going on and wondering if you might die. (Been there, done that. Not the bunker part, but the die/fear part: daily, nightly, for months on end. He didn't have time to get used to it, like I did.) So, okay. Bad guys, need to fight back. Yes.

I'll even forgive him, in his moment of panic, for turning to torture as his brain, drained of blood, scrabbled for protection. His hero, after all (the one on the right), when he was Cheney's age, couldn't distinguish between movies he'd been in or life experiences he'd had. So let's assume he tortured people (for it's now clear that the approvals came from him) for higher purposes, believing it works. But can we really swallow the idea that he considered it legal?

The tortured memos he demanded (yes, that's an assumption, but the evidence is that the torture began well before the memos, which smells of an attempt at retroactive cover) simply made up rationales for calling a pig a princess. What was done was torture. Torture is illegal.

But, okay, you want to save lives, you break the law. No big deal. If it works, who cares? Right?

Wrong. First of all, the way torture has always worked is in extracting false confessions. Ask John McCain. And as the evidence accumulates that most of the information obtained from captives was from legal methods, and that torture produced false information that was used to justify war (even after it was suggested that the info was false), and that torture was further used to try to get people to confess to links between al Queda and Saddam Hussein, it has become clear to all but the the deadest of dead-enders that torture is a bad thing. And that it was used, deliberately, by the United States of America, in exactly the way it had been used by despots and dictators for centuries: to force false confessions. Why doesn't that scare the crap out of everyone, even (especially) the RWS™?

Cheney insists we got useful information from torture. Maybe we did. What we still don't know is, first, whether it could have been gotten in other ways; second, how much false information was obtained (we know there was some, and it led to disaster); third, how, in a time of crisis, you can tell whether you're getting good or bad information, since it's undisputed that torture gives bad information (or desired answers, true or not); fourth, how much damage to the nation was done as the rest of the world found out what we'd done?

Listening to him yesterday, I wondered what he's really up to. Does he believe what he says? If so, is it because he's truly delusional, or because he knows things we don't? If that, does he simply discount the known failures? Is he trying to justify a program for his own protection, or because he still believes it was a good thing? Is he trying to change the subject from illegality and deliberate dredging for falsehoods to efficacy alone? Seems shaky ground either way, given what we're learning.

So he's a real puzzle, putting it mildly. Trashing his predecessor while claiming dissent gives comfort to our enemies. Making a case based on omissions and distortions. Can he not know?

There's one thing he says for which I'm all: release the documents. All of them. And, sure, let's find out about what was said to Pelosi. All of it. Let's have a full-fledged investigation of the whole program of torture, all of it.

Of course, that's not what he really wants. Like the Congressional Republicans, he wants to be highly selective and hide the ball. But let's not. Lets dig it all out, and let the chips fall. Where ever. Because if torture works, I want to see the data; and then, I want there to be a full discussion. Should we reject the Geneva Conventions, the agreements on torture, go it alone for our own safety? Should we be using it in our legal system? On guys like Timothy McVey? Serial murderers? Is there a line? Where? Why? I know what I think: no. It degrades us, it endangers us. It gives unreliable information. It makes us no different from those over whom we claim to have the higher ground.

Torture is illegal for good reasons, not the least of which is that it's too damn easy. To guys like Dick Cheney. Panicked, in his bunker. Looking for ways to feel unafraid. Looking for ways to feel tough, damn the implications, damn the dangers of falsehood it produces. Because of the falsehoods.

That's why I say no. And why I think it's time for Dick Cheney to return to Wyoming and lecture cows or whatever they have there. And for the media to stop acting like he has credibility equal to Barack Obama's.
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As Opposed To...

In the previous post is President Obama's speech on terrorism and policy, and my brief take on it. Then, like backflow from a clogged toilet, came Cheney. While he said nothing new, he did repeat the most anti-democratic essence of his administration:

And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for - our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

Of course, seeing the past leader attacking the current one does nothing of the sort.

Forgetting the obvious inconsistencies (because there are so many) and the irony (that it's HE who gave al Queda "exactly what they were hoping for," HE who has distracted our leaders), the central theme is that you can't discuss policy or air out differences or criticize the government (except if you're a Dick or his RWS™ host) because it gives comfort to our enemies. Democracy, and our Constitution, in other words, are to be ignored because they are fundamentally flawed. Our system of government, he says, is inadequate to deal with threats; the discourses of free and lawful society are signs of weakness.

What could be more unAmerican than that?

But it's exactly how he ruled, and I mean "he" and "ruled" literally. In doing so, in rejecting our own and international law, in trumping up reasons for invading Iraq, in torturing and incarcerating people illegally and improperly, he's left us nearly paralyzed as Obama tries to straighten it out, and while Congress fights over it in the most disingenuous and demagogic terms.

Dick Cheney will never admit how badly he damaged us. The question is, when will his remaining supporters do so? Can't the Republican party find a voice that remains true to its principles (such as they are, in tatters) but rejects this dangerous man, this rejecter of democracy?
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Yet Another Nail

As we witness the continuing spectacle of Dick Cheney polluting the airways while being fawned over by the usual RWS™ and their enablers, it's well to remember how wrong he and the president he controlled were on everything Iraq. From the costs, the time requirements, the liberator-greetings, to the idea of installing Ahmed Chalabi, the failings of the US citizen-rulers, the resistance to holding elections and to the writing of a constitution (how quickly we forget), it's pretty damning. And now, there's this:

In an eye-opening article in Vanity Fair, the one remaining feather in a rotting headdress is taken away, leaving mere smoke. There's nothing those guys said or did that was right. The "working," as in "the surge is working," could have happened years before it did. It's generally understood by all but the most idiotic that the real reason the "surge" worked is that the Sunni tribal leaders agreed to put down their arms: the so-called Sunni awakening. What the article says is that they offered to do so years earlier, the officers on the ground supported it, and the Bush administration rejected it.

After the Awakening, the Sunnis helped obliterate al-Qaeda’s networks in most of Sunni Iraq, a development that many believe did more to dampen the violence than the subsequent “surge” in American troop numbers. Having reached a peak in 2006 and early 2007, the casualty rates for combatants and civilians quickly plummeted.

What the history books should also record, revealed here for the first time, is that the Sunni insurgents had offered to come to terms with the Americans 30 months earlier, in the summer of 2004, during secret talks with senior U.S. officials and military commanders....

...For a variety of reasons, some of them petty, some of them ideological, and some of them still obscure, these men were blocked by superiors in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House.

The article includes this quote from a Jerry Jones, then special assistant to Rumsfeld:

“From July ’04 to mid-’07,” he points out, “you can directly attribute almost all those K.I.A. [killed in action] in the Sunni regions of Iraq to this fatal error, and if we hadn’t been fighting the Sunni, we’d have had a lot more resources for dealing with Shia militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr in places such as Baghdad. It didn’t have to happen. Those lives did not have to be lost.”

This is pretty strong stuff. And yet, like some sort of undead wraith wailing from a grave he refuses to occupy, Cheney is still out there, criticizing everything Obama, defending everything he did: the indefensible. The demonstrably failed. Worse, he's still given a platform, still given credence. And in Congress, his defenders and apologists do everything they can to block the changes we need, and the people who intend to carry them out.

As difficult are the challenges we face, we shouldn't have to be wasting time arguing over the obvious.
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Glimmer

The report is too sketchy to hang much on, but I liked reading this. I infer that the US might now be ready to follow a more rational and effective path in fighting terrorism. It's a fight not much suited to armies and invasions, except in those instances where camps, training grounds, etc, can be identified. Even then, it's been and remains iffy. Most certainly, invading countries NOT involved in terrorism (gimme a minute and I'll come up with an example) doesn't help at all.

So I find comfort in the implication that a new era of cooperation, of -- yes, I'll say it out loud -- law enforcement in the sense of intelligence gathering and police work and international coöperation might be at hand. Along with the steps taken thus far to abandon illegal detentions and torture, there's reason to hope that we might actually begin to make progress; to gain support for our efforts rather than to create more of the people against whom we're trying to defend ourselves, and to turn away (and away from) our friends.

Dick Cheney has surfaced from the slime, evidently able to breathe air for brief periods, enough to say once again that the steps President Obama has taken are making us less safe. I couldn't disagree more. After all the harm the former puppet master has done I can't understand why anyone still gives him a platform.

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Communicate To Failure

Dick Cheney is worried.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

This comes from an interview yesterday. It's hard to wrestle one's thoughts into some sort of organized stream after reading something like that.

First of all, I'd be worried, too, if it were anywhere close to the truth. Second of all -- and much more venal -- is the idea that the next guy to hold office is responsible for the failure of the previous guy to tamp down the threat. Or, more accurately, for having raised the threat exponentially and diminished by the same amount -- by virtue of bringing our country to its economic and defensive knees -- our ability to protect ourselves.

I'm trying to make any sense of it: it's as if you move into a home and do everything you can to make your neighbors hate you. Call them names, toss shit onto their lawns, kick in a couple of doors. Meanwhile you install an alarm system in your house that goes off at all the wrong times. Then you move out. A new family moves in, tries to calm the neighbors down, and attempts to fix the alarm system so it goes off less erratically. As the new family struggles to make way, you say to anyone who'll listen, "If someone lobs a firebomb at them, it's their fault."

Or this: You're the conductor of a train. You take it down the wrong track, head it downhill, damage the brakes, and then jump off. If it crashes, from the safety of your home you say it's the fault of the people you left on board.

But it's really even worse than that. Because what's really going on is that Cheney is setting Obama up, joining the rest of the crowd who all but call for Obama's failure. It's just that most aren't quite as gleeful or evil; Limbaugh et al are (overtly, anyway) only hoping for economic calamity to justify their failed catechisms. Cheney is less bashful: he hopes a few thousand -- heck, why not a couple million? -- Americans will DIE. And in the twisted logic that only he and people as similarly sickened can render, it will justify everything he did in the last eight years.

Only the most pollyannish among us thinks there are no threats out there. Only the most partisan hacks think the new administration is unaware nor doing everything they can about it. Closing Gitmo, per se, has nothing to do with future risk, but everything to do with future improvement in coöperation from other countries. (In the interview above-linked, Cheney continues to cite discredited data about Gitmo recidivism. Moreover, it was HIS administration that let them go, not Obama's!!! Closing Gitmo does not equate to releasing prisoners. Restoring a lawful way of dealing with enemies makes us all safer. But it's hard for some minds to get themselves around that idea.)

Like Cheney and Limbaugh, Osama bin Laden would love nothing more than to see Obama fail. Surely he hopes for a return to the Cheney/Bush policies that have been so good to him, and for continuation of the financial failure that leaves us so vulnerable to collapse. Of that, I have no doubt. I can only hope my vision of Cheney welcoming Osama in the back door is completely crazy. In reality, probably so; metaphorically, not so much.

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