Just when I'm ready to give up on Slate as hopelessly addicted to Mickey Kaus's bizarre type of thinking, someone like Fred Kaplan manages to hook me in. Today he takes the RNC to task for the lies they and their newest
Cheney made this comment: "Four years ago, some said the world had grown calm, and many assumed that the United States was invulnerable to danger. That thought might have been comforting; it was also false."
Who are these people who thought this? The implication is that it was the Democrats who preceded Bush and Cheney. But it was Bill Clinton's administration that stopped the millennium attack on LAX. It was Clinton's national security adviser who told Condoleezza Rice, during the transition period, that she'd be spending more time on al-Qaida that on any other issue. It was Rice who didn't call the first Cabinet meeting on al-Qaida until just days before Sept. 11. It was Bush's attorney general who told a Justice Department assistant that he didn't want to hear anything more about counterterrorism. It was Bush who spent 40 percent of his time out of town in his first eight months of office, while his CIA director and National Security Council terrorism specialists ran around with their "hair on fire," trying to get higher-ups to heed their warnings of an imminent attack.
"President Bush does not deal in empty threats and halfway measures," Cheney said. What is an empty threat if not the warnings Bush gave the North Koreans to stop building a nuclear arsenal? What is a halfway measure if not Bush's decision to topple the Taliban yet leave Afghanistan to the warlords and the poppy farmers; to bust up al-Qaida's training camps yet fail to capture Osama Bin Laden (whose name has gone unmentioned at this convention); to topple the Iraqi regime yet plan nothing for the aftermath?
The rest of the piece is worth checking out, particularly the last line, where, finishing with a rhetorical flourish, Kaplan suggests that the Veep go to Iraq and see how unilateralism is working out. Of course, Dick's heart probably couldn't take the kind of G forces that go with landings and takeoffs in a hostile fire zone. Which is too bad: perhaps he could finally show his mettle in a combat zone, as opposed to racking up more deferments than John Kerry got medals back in the day.
I guess by now everyone who wants to know is aware that the laundry list of weapons systems Zell pulled out of his tired old derriere to supposedly show John Kerry as soft on defense is thoroughly discredited--just old RNC spin hastily recycled and tacked together. Apparently, though, other parts of the Zell-raising oration were cribbed from the likes of World Nut Daily. Hmmm.
So we've got the World Nuts AND the Larouchies standing behind the curtain that comprises a tent wall of the GOP. Perhaps THAT'S the definition of "compassionate conservatism:" a place for the true nut cases to get their voices heard.
Well, if anyone is their guy, it's gotta be Dubya.
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