Word: cheneyism
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...private session with the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, there will be one too many people in the room. Bush and the 10 members of what’s better known as the Sept. 11 commission will be joined by Vice President Dick Cheney, who will only testify with the president by his side. This would almost be laughable, if it didn’t seriously hurt the commission’s chances of doing...
Limbaugh began the Cheney interview with a serious question: "Why did the Administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?" Cheney not only ducked it but gave an answer that was intentionally misleading: "Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things ..." (For the record: Clarke not only ran counterterrorism through 9/11 but remained on the job for another year as he watched in disgust the Administration divert its attention from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein...
...Cheney gave a reasonable answer to that one--the possibility of hacker terrorists getting into crucial defense-intelligence systems is serious business--but Rush was off to the races, laughing: "Well now, that explains a lot ..." And the Vice President played along: "Well ... he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff...
...demoted," Rush replied, his intention now clear: to convey the impression that Clarke was more interested in AOL chat rooms than in al-Qaeda sleeper cells. Cheney agreed. "It was as though he clearly missed a lot of what was going on," he said, and then quickly went on to the Clinton Administration's sorry history of counterterrorism and Clarke's complicity in that...
Others have dealt with the fundamental inaccuracies of Cheney's statements. I'm more concerned about the snide, dismissive, undignified quality of the Vice President's performance. He set the ugly, personal tone for the week, for the coordinated attacks on Clarke's character and motives. (The merits of Clarke's case were confirmed by the paper trail unearthed by the 9/11 commission's staff.) But the public seems to have tired of the Vice President's act. According to a Fox News poll last week, Cheney has an approval rating of 35%--and my guess is that the Administration...