Dick Cheney has emerged from his evil lair to spew
more hate and vitriolic, misleading critiques at a sitting President. After probably
the worst eight years in the recent history of the country, the Vice President
has the gall to now claim that it is President Obama who is ruing the standing
of America in the world. Is this Freudian projection? Is it a desperate man
trying to restore his legacy beyond the echo chamber of right-wing pundits? Or
is he really this delusional? Let’s take a look at the Op Ed, which was
published yesterday in the Wall
Street Journal, titled “The Collapsing Obama Doctrine: Rarely Has a
President Been So Wrong About So Much at the Expense of So Many.”
The most ironic element of this Cheney-family early
Christmas card is, if we replace “Obama” with “Bush,” the Op Ed actually would
have made sense, about six to eight years ago. After an opening parlay on Iraq
and Syria, the father and daughter write: “Rarely has a U.S. president been so
wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr.
Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as
though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality.
Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American
blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not
"decimated." They are emboldened and on the march.” Who was it that
got us into this war again? Who kept us there for so long? Who failed to meet
ever realize their ultimate goal, having to wait for Obama to finally get
Osama? Oh, yeah. But reality is a simple inconvenience for these terrorists of
truth.
Then he actually claims that the Iraq war was a
success when he and Bush finally left office, only eight years to late: “When
Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been
largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces
during the surge. Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind
some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help
secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American
defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.” Seriously?
After then arguing for several paragraphs that we
must stay at war with Afghanistan and Iraq for the foreseeable future, he
claims “It is time the president and his allies faced some hard truths: America
remains at war, and withdrawing troops from the field of battle while our
enemies stay in the fight does not "end" wars. Weakness and retreat
are provocative. U.S. withdrawal from the world is disastrous and puts our own
security at risk.” The Cheney dynamic duo then conclude as follows: “In 1983,
President Ronald Reagan said, "If history teaches anything, it teaches
that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is
folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom."
President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our
past and squandered our freedom.”
A willful blindness to the fact that he and Bush oversaw
the worst administration since Herbert Hoover 70 years earlier is
understandable, given the implications. The innocent civilians and American
soldiers who died for a lie, the tens of millions that lost their homes or
savings in 2007-08, the decimation of America’s reputation around the globe, the
failure to address global warming and environment degradation, a worsening
economic circumstance for the majority of Americans that looks unlikely to
improve anytime soon, a Supreme Court that consistently choses corporations and
the wealthy over the people and human rights, serious challenges to democracy
and civil liberties that continue to confront us and the inculcation of hate, victimhood
and malicious attacking as the GOP platform are less so. These are the legacies
of eight Bush/Cheney years. The joke of having to listen to him slander our
President is only tempered by the fact it was in the worst Op Ed section among
major newspapers in the country. Who owns that again?
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