Kudos to Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post for pushing back against the Cheney-Obama “dueling speeches” narrative started by Politico. Cillizza points out that there really is no equivalency:
The dueling speeches by President Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney are being cast as a showdown over national security but the tit for tat is a mismatch from the start.
Why?
Here are the last four personal favorability ratings for Obama: 56 percent, 68 percent 60 percent and 58 percent.
Here are the last four personal favorability ratings for Cheney: 37 percent, 18 percent, 19 percent and 30 percent.
What these numbers show clearly is that the American public is far more favorably inclined to listen to what the president has to say than they are to hear Cheney out.
Message matters in politics but only if the messenger is credible. In the context of a campaign, a negative attack only works when the person making the attack is trusted and believable.
Yes, “evil” is an overused word, but Dick Cheney comes closer to embodying evil than any other powerful government figure in our country’s history. If there’s someone who comes closer, I don’t know who that would be. Andrew Sullivan has further thoughts in this vein:
A simple note having now read the former vice-president’s despicable and disgraceful speech. It confirms the very worst of him, and reveals just how callow, just how arrogant, and just how reckless and unrepentant this man is and has long been. There was not a whisper of regret or reflection; there was a series of lies and distortions, a reckless attack on a graceful successor, inheriting a world of intractable problems, and a reminder that while serious men and women will indeed move on, Cheney never will. He remains a threat to this country’s constitution as he remains a stain on its honor and moral standing. I never believed I would hear a vice-president of the United States not simply defend torture but insist on pride in it, insist on its honor. But that is what he said, with that sly grin insisting that fear always beats reason, that violence always beats dialogue, and that torture is always an American value.
As for Cheney’s oft-repeated claim that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were the work of a few low-ranking, sadistic prisono guards who violated the rules and were punished for it (a mendacious narrative that Obama, unfortunately, reinforced in his own speech), James Lamond provides the facts:
… [A] declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report found there is in fact a direct link between the abuses at Guantanamo Bay and the abuses at Abu Graihb. It says that that the abuses at Abu Ghraib cannot be separated from the policies the Bush Administration put in place at Guantanamo and elsewhere. The committee’s report says, in part, that:
“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.”
The report goes on to specifically draw the link between abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay:
“The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”
Steve Hynd quotes Glenn Greenwald on Obama’s planned “ preventive detention” policy:
Obama’s speech today confirmed that he intends to find a way to preserve eternal detention policies begun by the Bush administration as part of a plan to open a gap in the Laws of War for torture, black sites and illegal rendition. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post up analysing the speech and the unpalatable actions that lie behing Obama’s always fine-sounding words.
Ultimately, what I find most harmful about his embrace of things like preventive detention, concealment of torture evidence, opposition to investigations and the like is that these policies are now no longer just right-wing dogma but also the ideas that many defenders of his — Democrats, liberals, progressives — will defend as well. …
[…]
So now, we’re going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we’re waging a War against Terrorism, a “War President” must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a “threat to Americans” but haven’t violated any laws, our normal court system can’t be trusted to decide who is guilty, Terrorists don’t deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to “keep us safe,” and — most of all — anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn’t really care about national security.
Obama discussed his preventive detention plans in a closed-door meeting with human rights advocates on Wednesday, a day before yesterday’s speech.
Digby has further thoughts on preventive detention:
There seems to be some misunderstanding about Guantanamo. Somehow people have gotten it into their heads is that it is nothing more than a symbol, which can be dealt with simply by closing the prison. That’s just not true. Guantanamo is a symbol, true, but it’s a symbol of a lawless, unconstitutional detention and interrogation system. Changing the venue doesn’t solve the problem.
I know it’s a mess, but the fact is that this isn’t really that difficult, except in the usual beltway kabuki political sense. There are literally tens of thousands of potential terrorists all over the world who could theoretically harm America. We cannot protect ourselves from that possibility by keeping the handful we have in custody locked up forever, whether in Guantanamo or some Super Max prison in the US. It’s patently absurd to obsess over these guys like it makes us even the slightest bit safer to have them under indefinite lock and key so they “can’t kill Americans.” The mere fact that we are doing this makes us less safe because the complete lack of faith we show in our constitution and our justice systems is what fuels the idea that this country is weak and easily terrified. There is no such thing as a terrorist suspect who is too dangerous to be set free. They are a dime a dozen, they are all over the world and for every one we lock up there will be three to take his place. There is not some finite number of terrorists we can kill or capture and then the “war” will be over and the babies will always be safe. This whole concept is nonsensical.
Digby additionally writes that Michael Isikoff reports that Pres. Obama appeared to close off the possibility of prosecutions, in a manner that seemed to overrule the Attorney General’s wishes in the matter:
A fine collection of words. But in his meeting with civil liberties and human rights groups yesterday, Obama suggested that he – not the Attorney General – would not allow such prosecutions to take place.
On at least one issue, though, Obama seems to have made up his mind. Isikoff reports that Obama announced his opposition to torture prosecutions–an unsurprising admission, perhaps, but one that must have disappointed many in attendance. Previously he had said that the question of investigation and prosecuting Bush administration officials was one for Holder to answer. But with Holder sitting right beside him, there’s no doubt he’s feeling pressure to, as they say, look forward, not backward.
So in public, the President gave a pretty speech about upholding the rule of law, but inside the White House, he vows not to uphold it, to do precisely the opposite of what he claims to believe makes us “who we are as a people.” In fact, it does violence to the rule of law for the President to even decide who does and does not get prosecuted, as that is nowhere near within his jurisdiction. …
But in an Update, Digby indicates that Isikoff’s interpretation (or his source’s) may be incorrect:
David Waldman was at the meeting, and he says on the point of investigations and prosecutions, Isikoff’s reporting is wrong. Duly noted.
Here is what Waldman has to say:
There’s not much I’d feel compelled to add to what’s already out there, though one thing that jumps out at me is that I don’t know that I’d be able to agree with the assessment Isikoff passes on that the President spoke for the Attorney General and foreclosed the option of investigations, prosecutions or the like. The President ran the meeting, and it was his session. But I don’t know that I’d agree that it was his intention to announce the foreclosure of any such options. It may ultimately be his actual intention, but it didn’t appear to be his intention to declare it then and there — a subtle difference perhaps, but that subtlety was pretty much characteristic of most of what he had to say. He took his time and approached the issues and his answers to our questions carefully. The absence of any comment from the Attorney General appeared to me to be more of an acknowledgment that it was the President who wanted to direct the discussion, and the White House staff and administration officials present weren’t getting in the way of that.
On the whole, though, Isikoff appears to have gotten a entirely reasonable picture of the meeting, if not exactly the one I’d have given. On the substance, I’d say he gives you as good a run-down as we’re likely to see on the air or in print.
In case it’s not clear, Isikoff’s information comes from a source who attended the meeting; Isikoff himself was not in attendance.
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