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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDick Cheney is back. Here’s why the GOP won’t listen to him.
By Paul Waldman August 31 at 12:06 PM
If you have been plagued in recent days by not knowing the answer to the question, What would Dick Cheney do?, then your sleepless nights may be behind you. The former vice president is back, with a new book (written with his daughter Liz), media interviews, and a much-promoted speech coming up next week.
But are the Republicans running for president listening?
That may seem like an odd question to ask. After all, the candidates seem united in their belief that Barack Obama is a weak weakling making America weak, and that if theyre president theyll be so strong they might just install an arm-wrestling pit on the South Lawn so those terrorists know who theyre messing with. But if you look a little closer, its hard to see much appetite even in the GOP for the kind of ambitious empire-building that Cheney advocates.
True to form, the excerpt of the Cheneys book published in the Wall Street Journal delivers all the falsehoods, bizarre leaps of logic, and panicky fear-mongering weve come to expect from them. Cheney tried to convince America that Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11th. He said that we do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon. He said, Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.
And that very same man now writes: The Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East and, more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
World War II figures prominently in Cheneys new narrative, and not just because he, like so many other Republicans, compares Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain. For Cheney, that war isnt just a story of what could go wrong, its a story of what could go right. Its a tale of American greatness and triumph, a heroic battle in which brave American boys are sent forth to beat back evil and secure our place as the guarantor of freedom in every corner of the globe:
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/08/31/dick-cheney-is-back-heres-why-the-gop-wont-listen-to-him/?
Xipe Totec
(43,888 posts)tularetom
(23,664 posts)Didn't he get like five draft deferments?
0rganism
(23,932 posts)* brave American boys not named Dick Cheney
The Blue Flower
(5,434 posts)We just prefer to do it at the ballot box.