Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 22, 2009, at 9:49 am
With a h/t to Tampa Bay political consultant Gregory Wilson, here’s a contrarian view on scoring yesterday’s pseudo-debate on terror, Gitmo and national security. I agree with Congressional Quarterly’s assessment of Barack Obama on conventional political terms. It is a truism: When you’re ’splaining, you’re losing. And I believe Obama made no headway with the crazy left who wants to shutter Guantanamo immediately and just cut loose the terrorists or bring them on down to circuit court for good ol’ U.S. justice system trials.
But Obama won the day, make no mistake about it. He was historic, clear in his ethics, determined in his purpose that we can win against terror without becoming terrorists ourselves. He may have lost in terms of short-term public opinion but he wins the longer war. And that is what CQ, in its traditional wisdom, fails to grasp.
Having said that, reading the full CQ article makes ya think…
Posted by Wayne Garcia on May. 21, 2009, at 6:08 am
Anybody needing a distillation of the differences between the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama on the “War on Terror” need look no further than today’s competing speeches by Dick Cheney and Obama on the subject.
President Barack Obama will attempt to regain control of a boiling debate over anti-terrorism policy with a major speech on Thursday — an address that comes on the same day that former Vice President Dick Cheney will be weighing in with his own speech on the same theme.
The dueling speeches amount to the most direct engagement so far between Obama and his conservative critics in the volatile argument over what tactics are justified in detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.
The national security debate — egged on by frequent charges from Cheney that Obama is leaving the country more vulnerable to attack — is the only subject on which many Republicans believe they have been able to gain traction against a popular president and the Democratic majority that now dominate Washington.
It ought to be hilariou-scary to see Cheney defend torture and keeping Gitmo open. The key to today’s semi-debate is not whether Cheney, wildly unpopular even in his own party, wins the hearts and minds of the U.S. citizenry but whether the president can score points on the left and in the middle with his “walk a thin line” approach.
Has anyone else noticed that Dick Cheney just won’t go away? Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has. Her take on Cheney as the new “Rogue Diva of Doom” after the jump.
By Ben Luongo
PoHo contributor Ben Luongo is a USF political science graduate student. He will be graduating this spring.
I watched Dick Cheney’s first interview since he left the vice-presidency on John King’s State of the Union Sunday public affairs talker. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I shouldn’t have thought it would be different from any other Cheney interview. I knew that Cheney would continue to defend all of Bush’s Iraq war policies – he has always demonstrated unshakable confidence in previous interviews. However, his confidence in his decisions often makes him appear clueless to the consequences of those decisions.
Unfortunately, the interview was just another display of thoughtless and tiresome arguments, with the most aggravating statement said by Cheney being “with respect to Iraq, at the end of now six years, is that we have accomplished nearly everything that we had set out to do.”
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.
Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.
Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney’s office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work.
Posted by Wayne Garcia on Dec. 22, 2008, at 9:45 am
Nine minutes of the outgoing vice president on the role of diplomacy … something that he knows nothing about. Enjoy him while you can, because in less than a month you won’t have Dick Cheney to kick around any more. And check out the evil “I wish to God I could bomb Iran” smirk on his face as he lies at the 1:50 mark.
