Dick Cheney is going head-to-head with Obama today. Both are making big speeches on national security (Obama's obviously being somewhat more consequential).
The former VP, through sheer persistence, has had some success in pushing his storyline across (success, that is, as measured in chatter - there's no evidence, yet, that he's shifted the public's views). The story is that he and Bush kept America safe - even if they did resort to "harsh" interrogation techniques, Gitmo, etc - and that Obama is endangering the nation because he wants to play nicey-nice with an enemy that doesn't care.
Cheney's version of history pretends that the Bush presidency lasted not eight years, but less than two and a half, starting on 10 September 2001 and ended on 28 April 2004.
He can't be counting the months pre-9/11 because to do so would be to admit culpability for the attacks: there's plenty of evidence that they took their eye of the Al Qaeda ball during this time, and the trouble is, you can't pretend that terrorist attacks are unpredictable disasters with one breath and then set the next guy up for a fall with the next (this is sort of like Gordon Brown and the economy in reverse - if the credit crunch was just bad luck then surely the ten years of growth was largely good luck).
Neither can he be counting the months and and years post-Abu Ghraib, because as Laurence Wilkerson points out and Obama himself reiterates, the Cheney-Rumsfeld approach to fighting terrorism pretty much came to an end after those photographs were published: the CIA shut down its "harsh interrogation techniques" for fear of prosecution and the administration began to shift to a decidedly more conciliatory, multilateral approach to diplomacy.
A short presidency, then. We can agree, however, that Cheney got a lot done during those two and a half years.
In addition to implicitly limiting the temporal scope of his claims as you say, Cheney must also be limited the spatial scope: In claiming to have kept the USA safe from terrorist attacks while in office, he must surely be excluding from his definition of "the USA" those people killed or injured by the anthrax attacks.
What a sleazy, squalid, thug Cheney is.
Posted by: peter | May 21, 2009 at 08:56 PM
Starting on 10/11/01?
Posted by: jncc | May 22, 2009 at 12:40 AM
I cannot give any credibility to anyone who places blame for something like 9-11 on one single individual. Just not grown up and responsible.
Posted by: arizona carpet cleaning | July 11, 2009 at 02:04 AM