Cheney's KO of Obama

Cheney is apparently the last remaining alpha male in the republican party. While the republican "leadership" is wimpering about the media or trying to get in touch with their values, this 68 year old is taking Obama to the hole and dunking on him.

From Bloomberg:

Cheney Clashes With Obama as Republicans Avoid Fight (Update1)


By Hans Nichols and Justin Blum

May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Former Vice President Dick Cheney accomplished something yesterday that Republicans have seldom been able to do: directly challenge President Barack Obama in real time on a major policy issue.

In a nationally televised speech delivered just minutes after Obama had spoken on how to protect the U.S. against terrorism, Cheney defended the decisions he and former President George W. Bush made after the Sept. 11 attacks, including using harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects.

While Republican leaders have largely avoided direct attacks on Obama and focused instead on Democratic congressional leaders, Cheney, 68, has taken the opposite tack. Republican lawmakers and strategists said he was able to raise the intensity of the criticism yesterday because, unlike other party members, he isn’t worried about damaging any future political ambitions by taking on a popular president.

Cheney “might not have the highest favorability ratings, but on this issue, I think he’s viewed by people across the country as being very credible and very knowledgeable,” said Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican. “What he says carries a lot of weight.”

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Cheney’s prominence in the debate was actually an advantage for the administration, because it showed disarray within the Republican Party.

Anyone But Cheney

Most Republicans would probably prefer to be represented by a standard-bearer whose name was “picked out of a hat” rather than Cheney, Emanuel said in an interview.

In a poll by CNN/Opinion Research Corp. that was released this week, 55 percent of respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Cheney, compared with 37 percent who had a favorable view. That was an 8-percentage-point improvement from January, when Bush and Cheney left office with approval ratings near the lowest levels in history. By contrast, Obama’s approval ratings have been above 60 percent since he took office Jan. 20.

Still, Republican strategist Jim Pinkerton said Cheney’s popularity “doesn’t really matter,” because he “is not running for anything.” What is important, he said, is that “Cheney absolutely has the better of the argument.”

Ask Harry Reid

Pinkerton pointed to the 90-6 vote in the Senate on May 20 when Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, joined Republicans to strip from a spending measure the $80 million Obama requested to fulfill his promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by the end of the year.

“Don’t take my word for it, take Harry Reid’s word for it,” Pinkerton said.

Obama appeared yesterday at the National Archives, the repository of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, to criticize the previous administration’s policies and build public support for his national-security approach in the wake of reversals such as the Senate vote.

The detention center at Guantanamo, he said, “set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world.” The Bush administration “was defending positions that undermined the rule of law,” he said. Its decisions on how to handle suspected terrorists were built on “ad hoc” legal measures that were “neither effective nor sustainable.”

‘Most Fundamental Values’

“We also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values,” Obama said. “Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset.”

The president also indicated that some prisoners who can’t be tried for legal reasons and are considered too dangerous to let go may be held indefinitely.

He noted that more than 500 Guantanamo detainees had been released under the Bush administration.

Almost as soon as Obama finished his remarks, Cheney began speaking just two miles away, at the American Enterprise Institute, a research organization that generally supported Bush’s policies.

He opened his speech by joking about Obama’s address starting late. His tone quickly turned more grave as he claimed that interrogation tactics such as waterboarding saved American lives.

‘Stop Them’

“When an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them,” he said. He would make those decisions again “without hesitation,” he said.

“Our government prevented attacks and saved lives,” Cheney said at AEI, where his wife, Lynne, is a senior fellow. “Only detainees of the highest intelligence value were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Cheney faulted Obama for releasing Justice Department memos that authorized the use of those techniques. Doing so “was flatly contrary to the national security interests of the United States,” Cheney said.

John Feehery, a Republican consultant, said Cheney’s instant response to Obama gave his party one of its rare victories since the Democrats took control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in the November election: the ability to challenge Obama’s domination of the airwaves and the news cycle.

That success, said Feehery, who served as spokesman for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, was linked to the decision to engage the Democrats on the theme of national security, a subject where Republicans have historically had an advantage.

‘Everything We Could’

“The percentages are more with Cheney than Obama,” Feehery said. “What Cheney is basically arguing is that we did everything we could to make the country safer, and what Obama is arguing is that we don’t have to do as much to make the country safer.”

Feehery said Cheney had gotten the better of the president with barbed lines like one in which he said the current administration’s approach is more geared to receiving “applause in Europe” than protecting America’s security.

“There’s no doubt about it, this is the first time they’ve got him,” he said. “This is the first time that Republicans feel like they have some momentum.”

He said Cheney’s defense of the Bush policies as necessary to protect the U.S. will seem prescient in the event of a terrorist attack.

“If something goes wrong, people are going to remember what Cheney said,” Feehery said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Hans Nichols in Washington at hnichols2@bloomberg.net; Justin Blum in Washington at jblum4@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 22, 2009 11:00 EDT

 

Cheney's is in-full-on-OMG-I've-got-to do-everything-I-can-to-save-our-legacy-mode.

 

So much of this is just repetitive. Comments by Cheney about spending taxpayer money on jails, but not Gitmo? Being less or more safe by trying to prove a negative like no terrorist attacks? And, Obama actually re-considering his pledge? yadayadayada.

As I've said a few times in the past. We survived the USSR for 30 years, and managed to keep our judicial system intact, including habeous corpus. We had non-uniformed comatants with the Columbian Drug lords, who were much bigger, stronger, and better financed than alquaeda.

This whole fear thing has gone way overboard. We allowed the terrorists to win by completely screwing up our ability as Americans to simply go through an airport. On a side note, it did help with unemployment by forming the TSA, basically hiring the unemployable.

The old - if an alien were to have visited in 1943 and saw the gulags of Hitler, and then returned to see Gitmo full of detainees, nice word for prisoners, they would simply think that wars on this planet are run by savages who give no one any rights.

Look, I don't care where they put the bastards, just try to remember that the U.S. is supposed to be a land of laws.

To quote the old Billy Jack movie. When lawmen break the law, there is no law.

Cheney's a nut, and Obama is caving, yea, what a great day in America. However, smart of Cheney to distract from the torture mess. And, where the Hell is George W in all this? Actually being gracious enough to go away softly.




c

 

The biggest compliment to Bush/Cheney is the fact that Obama is continuing most of the policies he ran against.

Close Gitmo? Not just yet.

Suspend warrentless wiretaps? Maybe later

Bring troops home? Well, after we finish in Afghanistan.

I'll give Obama this. At least he is smart enough to realize you can't defend the country on campaign style hyperbole.

 

I guess Bush appointees Condi Rice and Colin Powell must also be in the "substance" camp, because they ALSO wanted to close GITMO.

 

A pretty pathetic soul, that's for sure.
Talk about "spinning" a legacy . . .
At least Dubya has kept his
mouth shut and shows
some class.

 

Cheney would chew and spit Obama out if they were ever to meet in a debate.

Won't happen but damn, would that be fun to watch.

 

That is a good one.

This is what Cheney will say:

Unless we hold on to a bunch of nobodys in gitmo, a bunch of ragheads with ak-47s will come out of their caves in afganistan, make their way towards indian ocean, build a fleet of rafts, overwhelm US navy, the coast guard, land in florida, overwhelm florida national guard, all of US army and marine divisions, all reserves, crush US airforce and kill us all.

You have to be really naive to believe that will happen.

 

Obama says Gitmo is considered inflammatory. Bring in new managers and rename the Camp. That's all!!

Obama is correct that our prisons can handle the terrorists, but no one doubted that, your fool!!

Problem is that the prisons become targets and even more troublesome is the prison guards and their families become targets.

 

<img src="http://www.psbandit.com/teleprompter.jpg" />

"just me against Cheney! let me at em."