If you know your classic cartoons – from the days long before SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer – you know that Bugs Bunny was always pursued by the odd little hunter, the little bald fellow with the shotgun, Elmer Fudd. But he never shot Bugs. He was hopeless. He always shot the wrong thing. Each cartoon was about how foolish he was, and how very comically persistent – “Be vewy, vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits.”
And on Sunday, February 12, 2006, Vice President Cheney had his Elmer Fudd moment – he too shot the wrong thing, his elderly hunting partner, who then apologized to the vice president, and the America people, for getting shot. Of course it was cartoonishly absurd, and it didn’t help that Cheney does look quite a bit like Elmer Fudd. The press had a field day. But Cheney scowled repeatedly, and gave his one interview about it all to Sean Hannity of Fox News, and everyone moved on. Everyone knew he was a mean guy, and that he used any means possible to destroy people who made him look foolish, so you didn’t mess with him. What had happened to that Wilson fellow and his CIA wife said it all.
But like Elmer Fudd, he is persistent, and on Thursday, October 22, 2009, America woke up to find that he was back:
The Obama administration is dithering on a decision about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, former Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday night, and accused the White House of trying to shift the blame for its inaction on the Bush administration.
In a wide-ranging speech, the former vice president pilloried the Obama administration on a host of issues from President Obama’s engagement with Iran to his decision to shut down the military prison at Guantanamo and his abandonment of the Bush administration’s missile defense plans in Eastern Europe.
But what appeared to vex Mr. Cheney the most was recent remarks by Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, that part of the reason why the Afghanistan review was taking so long was because the White House was asking questions which had never been asked before.
Not true, Mr. Cheney told an audience while accepting the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame” award.
It seems the White House, like Bugs Bunny, was prepared for that:
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said former Vice President Dick Cheney was “for seven years not focused on Afghanistan” after Cheney said President Barack Obama “seems afraid to make a decision” about sending more troops to the conflict.
“What Vice President Cheney calls dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public,” Gibbs said at a news briefing today. “An increase in troops sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president’s, for more than eight months.”
Each link above will provide you with the details of this spat, but what is more fascinating is this award, the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame Award.” What flame? Who is a flaming what here? Inquiring minds want to know.
And Alex Koppelman at salon.com fills us on the Center and the award:
It was, to say the least, an interesting venue for that kind of speech. Admittedly, the award has been given to plenty of other prominent figures, from former President Ronald Reagan to James Jones, who’s now President Obama’s national security advisor, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. and Donald Rumsfeld. (Of that last man, Cheney said Wednesday, “truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such a distinguished list.”)
But the Center for Security Policy was founded by Frank Gaffney, who remains the organization’s president. And in recent months, Gaffney has been an even harsher critic of Obama’s than Cheney himself — and a much more extreme one.
Koppelman cites the op-ed Gaffney wrote for the Washington Times in June – America’s First Muslim president?
Koppelman notes that it wasn’t really a question, as Gaffney said this:
During his White House years, William Jefferson Clinton – someone Judge Sonia Sotomayor might call a “white male” – was dubbed “America’s first black president” by a black admirer. Applying the standard of identity politics and pandering to a special interest that earned Mr. Clinton that distinction, Barack Hussein Obama would have to be considered America’s first Muslim president. …
After his five months in office, and most especially after his just-concluded visit to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, however, a stunning conclusion seems increasingly plausible: The man now happy to have his Islamic-rooted middle name featured prominently has engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich. …
[T]here is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself … In the final analysis, it may be beside the point whether Mr. Obama actually is a Muslim. In the speech and elsewhere, he has aligned himself with adherents to what authoritative Islam calls Shariah – notably, the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood – to a degree that makes Mr. Clinton’s fabled affinity for blacks pale by comparison.
During an appearance on MSNBC in April, Gaffney had said that Obama clearly had been signaling to the world’s Muslims that the United States would submit to Sharia law – it was obvious. And the year before in the Washington on Times he did the Birther thing – “Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii … Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter.” And so on and so forth.
Koppelman, considering all this, is not impressed with an award from this man:
According to the prepared text as provided to the Weekly Standard, the former vice president called the Obama administration’s decision to scrap missile defense in Eastern Europe “a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith,” slammed the administration’s positions on Iran and Iraq, said of Afghanistan that the White House is “dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger” and defended the Bush administration’s anti-terror policies.
Yawn. Here’s the full text. See for yourself. It includes this:
Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after 9/11 was a fading memory … Eight years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive – and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed. So you would think that our successors would be going to the intelligence community saying, “How did you do it? What were the keys to preventing another attack over that period of time?”
Instead, they’ve chosen a different path entirely – giving in to the angry left, slandering people who did a hard job well, and demagoguing an issue more serious than any other they’ll face in these four years. No one knows just where that path will lead, but I can promise you this: There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for the policies and the people that have kept this country safe.
He goes on to say that torture is necessary, as it works, and is the only thing that works, and the Obama people are crazy – they’ll get us all killed. There is no middle ground – yes, many of those we tortured really knew nothing useful, or were picked up by mistake and were innocent bystanders, and, yes, such prisoners do die sometimes, but better safe than sorry.
Of course that’s a paraphrase. Actually he said this:
For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings – and least of all can that be said of our armed forces and intelligence personnel. They have done right, they have made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.
This was pretty astonishing, and then Scooter Libby got his award too, although Scooter would probably prefer to be readmitted to the bar, as, as a convicted felon, he can no longer make a living, as he had, as a lawyer. But the little statuette was pretty nifty. It would have to do.
Maybe this was a cartoon.
As for Cheney, Joan Walsh, the editor of salon.com, says she doesn’t quite know where to begin:
How does a man who spent much of his vice presidency hiding in a secret bunker get off accusing the president of being “afraid”? How does a guy who got five deferments from service in Vietnam, because he famously had “other priorities,” call someone else a coward? (Still, Chickenhawk Cheney had no problem sending other people’s children off to die in needless wars.) How does a guy who dropped the ball on the Afghan war, letting Osama bin Laden escape and the Taliban retrench, blame someone else for “dithering” on Afghanistan?
Now, as Obama is forced to dig out of another Bush-Cheney mess he inherited, and the former veep is savaging him again? The irony is that it’s true that Obama approved a troop increase that had been requested during the Bush-Cheney administration, but as press secretary Robert Gibbs notes, that’s because it “sat on desks in this White House, including the vice-president’s, for more than eight months.”
But she is cheered by the people stepping up to smack Cheney down, like Retired General Paul Eaton:
The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for seven years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it. 2. Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11.
The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy “experts” have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. …
No human endeavor can be as profound as sending a nation’s youth to war. I am very happy to see serious men and women working hard to get it right.
But then who knows more about how best to manage counter-insurgency warfare, a measly general, or the best military mind of the age, Cheney? The answer depends on who you ask. Ask Frank Gaffney.
And don’t ask the former Republican senator, Lamar Alexander:
I think President Obama is entitled to take sufficient time to decide what our long-term role ought to be in Afghanistan. Then I think he should come to Congress and say to the American people what that plan is and see if he can persuade us and all of the American people of the rightness of it because he needs to have support all the way through to the end of that mission, so I want him to take the time to get it right.
Walsh offers this:
Maybe the tide is turning on Cheney, and even responsible Republicans are starting to realize he is one of the most unpopular figures in American history, whose administration will be remembered for its un-won wars and economic collapse. I think Cheney should take a break from speechifying, maybe spend more time at home with his family, frightening his grandchildren.
Yeah, well, they’re watching SpongeBob SquarePants or some such thing. They wouldn’t get the whole Elmer Fudd thing.
But Walsh may be right. All this may help Obama. See Marc Lynch:
Thanks, Dick Cheney – whenever I fret about Obama, you’re there to buck me up and remind me of the alternative.
And Adam Serwer offers this:
The Obama administration raised troop levels in Afghanistan and increased drone strikes in the region (whether one agrees with those choices or not) – to the extent that they haven’t implemented a new strategy, they’ve been following the one the Bush administration put in place for the past eight years give or take. So Cheney is basically admitting that the Bush administration strategy was itself “dithering,” which doesn’t seem to be a strong point from which to launch criticism.
Cheney claims the Bush administration conducted its own strategy review before they left office that had similar results, but that just seems to bolster my above point: The Bush administration implemented a strategy of “dithering” in Afghanistan for years, and now that he’s out of office, Cheney wants to lecture the Obama administration on expediency.
Hey, relax. It’s a cartoon.
But see Andrew Sullivan:
The former vice-president and war criminal again assails the president of the United States because he won an election pledging to reverse the dead-end policies of his discredited and incompetent predecessors… There is also the chilling formula of Cheney speaking of torture as if it were merely a case of hurrying up legitimate and traditional interrogation.
That seems to really bug Sullivan:
Cheney should recall that the Republican nominee for president past time around believed that Cheney authorized torture, took the position that waterboarding was indisputably torture, and that the Bush administration had grotesquely violated American honor by embracing the tactics of police states and totalitarian regimes. If Cheney travels abroad (which is probably an unwise thing for a war criminal to do), he might understand the depth of the abyss he cast the US’s reputation into.
So this is not a cartoon? Of course it’s not:
Cheney is fighting against a narrative that will, in due course, cast him in history as one of the most criminal and incompetent officials in American history. It is logical for him to fight in this way, to lie about his record and to attack a sitting president in the vilest way possible while that president and the country remains at war. It is not logical for anyone else to take him the faintest bit seriously.
Except for this: For a former vice-president to do this in real time, and to use this kind of rhetoric, and play with these kinds of stakes – to warn, in fact, that any future terror attack will be blamed on the president, not al Qaeda, and used as partisan tool to get his own allies in power again to prevent justice being brought to him and his criminal cronies – well, it’s as despicable as the rest of Cheney’s record.
Which is saying something. I wondered if Cheney’s record and legacy could get even worse after his eight years of thuggery and incompetence. He’s proving every day that it can.
Given the hunting accident of February 12, 2006, we all should have seen what was coming. But then, we don’t have to take him seriously. Whoever Fox News can whip up, and the remaining twenty percent of America who identify themselves as Republicans can go on living inside the cartoon if they wish.
And they’ll always have Glenn Beck:
Did you know OnStar has the ability to shut off your engine, deflate your tires and listen to what you are saying inside your car?
It’s true. They never used to use this technology, though it has been available – but now that the government is running GM, apparently they have decided to go ahead with it.
Did we miss that press release? At the very least, it should concern you… with this kind of technology in the wrong hands.
Yep, it is a cartoon.
Just Above Sunset 