If you’ve been wondering where Vice President Dick Cheney has been (definitely not hunting since there have been no new headlines) he has been quite busy doing a medley of his favorite hot-button lines to party faithful audiences:
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Democratic leaders aren’t doing enough to fight terrorism and said Americans must “reject any strategy of resignation and defeatism in the face of determined enemies.
Cheney, speaking at a party fundraiser, said Republicans must keep national security on the minds of voters heading into the November midterm election.
Cheney used his 20-minute address to defend the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and point fingers at Democrats.
And you can tell which finger on each hand he was pointing, too:
“We have to stay on the offensive until the danger to civilization is removed,” Cheney told about 110 people at the Pfister Hotel in downtown Milwaukee.
“Danger to civilization?” I thought this was a speech about terrorism and national security, not Jackass Number Two. AND:
Cheney attacked Democrats for turning their backs on Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., after his loss in the primary to anti-war candidate Ned Lamont.
This suggests an appeal to centrist Democrats, a further effort to portray the Democratic party as a transformed party of the nearly exclusive left, and another affirmation that Joe Lieberman is the administration’s favorite Democrat (which is bad or good thing, depending on where you’re politically coming from.). MORE:
He took Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean to task for saying the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer and accused Dean and Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., of advocating what Cheney called a failed policy of retreat in the war against terrorism.
The vice president chided Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada for opposing the Patriot Act and suggesting the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq, even if it meant leaving Saddam in power.
WHEW! Didn’t he take a breath?
But Harry Reid had a few things to say:
Reid responded Monday by saying the White House has lost all credibility on matters of national security.
“With Iraq in a civil war, Afghanistan moving backward and our own borders unsecured, it’s clear George Bush and Dick Cheney are desperate to hide their record and distort the truth,” Reid said.
What’s not amusing is the fact that Cheney is (again) stooping to demonization, in effect saying that if Americans vote for Democrats they’ll die. Republicans=Life. Democrats=Death. This doesn’t amuse this independent voter. We could make a cheap shot joke about the lifespan of some citizens who lived in a certain city in Louisiana and counted on Cheney & Co…but we wouldn’t stoop so low…
Just title the 2006 GOP campaign The Fear Factor.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.