Friday, July 02, 2004

Cheney Unrelenting on War Policy

Here's my letter to the LA Times regarding their story about Cheney's insanity today:

Your headline should read "Cheney Unrelenting in Personal Search for Insanity." His grasp of reality has deteriorated to beyond spin, and it's high time for a Pulitzer Prize winning news organization to call him to task. For instance, you made no attempt to point out that he was disingenuous at best, and outright lying at worst, when he said "Consider for a moment how matters stood at the time when President [sic] Bush and I were sworn into office on Jan. 20th, 2001. Terrorists were on the offensive around the world, emboldened by many years of unanswered attacks. Repeatedly they had struck America with little cost or consequence."

I think The Times should point out the truth here. Not only did Bill Clinton retaliate for attacks on American interests, but he was criticized by Cheney and his friends for "wagging the dog" when he did. At the very time in question, Republicans had Bill a little tied up with an impeachment proceeding. If Cheney and his right wing nut friends were so worried about defending American interests, perhaps they should have dropped their witch hunt over a sexual indiscretion.

Furthermore, if Cheney wants to find non-responses to terror attacks on Americans, he need look no farther than Ronald Reagan's response to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. At that time, Congressman Cheney didn't have a lot of whining to do when Reagan's response was to withdraw from Lebanon, thereby proving to the terrorists that they could achieve their goals (getting Americans out of their country) by committing terrorists acts against them.

If Dick Cheney bothered to read Dick Clark's book, he'd know that Bill Clinton did plenty to combat terrorism, including actually chairing meetings on terrorism, snatching terrorists, stopping terrorist plots, and prosecuting those who actually committed terrorism, like the bombing of the World Trade Center.

The Times needs to serve their subscribers by printing the truth along side Cheney's lies, especially if he is going to continue these maniacal rants.

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