Cheney and the spirit of 9/11

By Libby

I'm not so sure the best way to honor the newest graduating class of the US Military Academy, who are about to lay their lives on the line for Bush's folly, is to subject them to Cheney's political swill. It appears no occassion is so sacred that the White House won't use it to advance their sorry excuses for the occupation.

Here's just a small sample, because you know, in the post 9/11 world, everything is always about those dang evil-doers.

They have given themselves to an ideology that rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of society. The terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds, and they hate nothing more than the country you have volunteered to defend.

The terrorists know what they want and they will stop at nothing to get it. By force and intimidation, they seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child lives in total obedience to their ideology. Their ultimate goal is to establish a totalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital. They view the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again. And now they have chosen to make Iraq the central front in their war against civilization.

This coming from the guy who routinely called war dissenters traitors, (until nearly 3/4 of Americans joined their ranks), who supports the reversal of Roe v. Wade and who fully embraced the politics of polarization and the promotion of fear-based policies in order to keep his party in power. Plus, if you change the references from terrorists to the Bush administration in that second graf, it would serve as a perfect summary of the administration's tenure.

And this sentence pretty well sums up the biggest problem with the current policy in Iraq.

We know from history that when people live in freedom, answering to their own conscience and charting their own destiny, they will not be drawn to the ideologies of hatred and violence.

That's true enough. Too bad Cheney is not willing to live up to that lofty rhetoric and allow the Iraqis the freedom to exercise their alleged sovereignty rather than being held hostage to US interests. Maybe then at least the Sadrists would stop wanting to kill us.

There's nothing particularly notable in this rote speech except that nearly six years later, Cheney still specifically evokes 9/11 so many times. It got me to wondering how many public statements given by either Bush or Cheney in this time span have not mentioned 9/11 at all? I'm betting there aren't more than three between the two of them. And I'd also wager that if this was a Democratic administration, the "liberal" media would have been screaming about this shameless exploitation of the dead, years ago.

Update By Cernig The Blue State has more analysis of Cheney's speech.

His logic is disturbingly stunning. Al Qaeda is [in Iraq] in mass because of our occupation. So in order to win, we will have to kill every single member of the network in Iraq, hope that the organization has a 0% recruitment rate, and hope that no new foreign al Qaeda fighters enter the country. Those are odds that not even a chronic gambler would bet on.

Indeed.