http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100704Z.shtmlCheney's Avalanche of Lies By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 06 October 2004
"The vice president, I'm surprised to hear him talk about records. When he was one of 435 members of the United States House, he was one of 10 to vote against Head Start, one of four to vote against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors. He voted against the Department of Education. He voted against funding for Meals on Wheels for seniors. He voted against a holiday for Martin Luther King. He voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. It's amazing to hear him criticize either my record or John Kerry's."
- Senator John Edwards, 10/05/04 Clearly, Dick Cheney is no George W. Bush.
On Thursday night in Florida, Bush exposed himself as unprepared, easily ruffled, angry, excitable and muddled. As one wag put it, he came to a 90 minute debate with 10 minutes of material. On Tuesday night in Ohio, Cheney showed the American people who is really running things at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was controlled, calm, every inch the CEO in charge.
Cheney was also every inch the snarling, hunch-shouldered golem that has made him one of the least popular politicians in recent memory. He seldom looked up at moderator Gwen Ifill, or at the cameras facing him, choosing instead to speak into his own chest for the entire night. Cheney appeared, overall, to cut quite the frightening figure, the dark night to Edwards' optimistic day.
The other problem for Cheney, of course, was the way he lied with nearly every word that passed his curled lips. It was a virtuoso performance of prevarication, obfuscation and outright balderdash. On Thursday night, George W. Bush played the part of a man who couldn't possibly defend his record. On Tuesday night, Cheney acted as though that record did not exist.
Cheney was behind the eight-ball before he even entered the hall, tasked to defend his administration's rationale for invading and occupying Iraq. Unfortunately for him, journalists record statements made by important people. In 1992, then-Defense Secretary Cheney spoke to the Discovery Institute in Seattle, WA. Recall that the United States was flush from the trouncing of Iraq in the first Gulf War. Cheney was asked why coalition forces didn't roll tanks on Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein. Cheney's response, given 14 years ago, could well describe the mess we currently find ourselves in.
"I would guess if we had gone in there," said Cheney in 1992, "I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home. And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war."
For the record, 1,064 American soldiers have died in this second round of war in Iraq. An additional 138 soldiers from the 'coalition' Bush and Cheney assembled have also died, bringing the total to 1,202. Edwards made the point several times that the United States was bearing "90% of the coalition causalities" in Iraq, and that the American people are bearing "90% of the costs of the effort in Iraq." Cheney tried to say this wasn't true, but the body count numbers don't lie, and never mind the burden being carried by the Iraqi people, more than 20,000 of whom have perished since the invasion began.
"And the question in my mind," continued Cheney in 1992, "is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
Cheney's answer to this glaring contradiction, of course, is "September 11," i.e. the terrorist attacks changed everything. It doesn't change the facts of a disastrous occupation, or the overwhelming financial burden being placed on American taxpayers because of Bush administration failures, and it certainly doesn't explain 1,064 folded American flags handed to American families who thought their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, mothers and fathers were going to Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction and protect the United States.
Page 01 of the Washington Post for Wednesday 06 October carries an article titled 'Report Discounts Iraq Arms Threat,' which reads in paragraph one: "The government's most definitive account of Iraq's arms programs, to be released today, will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, U.S. officials said yesterday."
(snip)
It went on like this for 90 minutes, and got quite silly at one point. Cheney tried to paint Edwards as an absentee Senator by claiming he'd not met Edwards until that night. CNN and the other networks, a couple of hours later, began showing video of the two of them sitting together for several hours during the National Prayer Breakfast in February of 2001. It seems a silly thing to lie about, what with all the chaos and dead people we're all dealing with, but the media appeared happy to seize upon it. So it goes.
...more...
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