Update on the Zell and Dick Show

Slate has a good article exposing Zell and Dick to the light of historical fact, though their clear mendacity has driven the author, Fred Kaplan, into a more confrontational rhetoric than the usual dispassionate fact-check. I understand his problem (which seems endemic among those of us who quaintly believe in objective truths and the use of words to educate and uplift, not mislead and manipulate.)

Later in the speech, Cheney made this comment: "Four years ago, some said the world had grown calm, and many assumed that the United States was invulnerable to danger. That thought might have been comforting; it was also false."

Who are these people who thought this? The implication is that it was the Democrats who preceded Bush and Cheney. But it was Bill Clinton's administration that stopped the millennium attack on LAX. It was Clinton's national security adviser who told Condoleezza Rice, during the transition period, that she'd be spending more time on al-Qaida that on any other issue. It was Rice who didn't call the first Cabinet meeting on al-Qaida until just days before Sept. 11. It was Bush's attorney general who told a Justice Department assistant that he didn't want to hear anything more about counterterrorism. It was Bush who spent 40 percent of his time out of town in his first eight months of office, while his CIA director and National Security Council terrorism specialists ran around with their "hair on fire," trying to get higher-ups to heed their warnings of an imminent attack.

"President Bush does not deal in empty threats and halfway measures," Cheney said. What is an empty threat if not the warnings Bush gave the North Koreans to stop building a nuclear arsenal? What is a halfway measure if not Bush's decision to topple the Taliban yet leave Afghanistan to the warlords and the poppy farmers; to bust up al-Qaida's training camps yet fail to capture Osama Bin Laden (whose name has gone unmentioned at this convention); to topple the Iraqi regime yet plan nothing for the aftermath?

I'm glad Fred picked up on Cheney's use of the "some think [insert an absurd thing that none of their opponents think]" riff, which I pointed out in a previous post. (They like to use it with the implication that the Democrats somehow want to "negotiate" with terrorists.) Nice of him to point out that if anyone DID think it, it was probably this administration.
There's more where that came from.