Cheney a Ranting Lunatic?

John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, who has also covered elections for The Progressive and has had his articles appear in The New York Times, criticized Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday on The Nation's blog sight, for comments he made on CNN's Larry King Live back in June."

Nichols wrote, "Vice President Dick Cheney, who predicted on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that Americans would be "greeted as liberators," has in recent weeks been peddling a new line of spin. If Cheney was not in charge of U.S. foreign policy, he could be dismissed as a ranting lunatic."

What's the 'spin' Cheney is guilty of according to Nichols? For saying he thinks there's been major progress in Iraq and that, "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.'"

Nichols then contrasts Dick Cheney's 'spin' to John Kerry's words before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, "Any attempt to address Cheney's rhetorical excesses brings to mind the words of a young veteran from another misguided and unnecessary war. 'How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?'
For Cheney, that's simple: Just keep telling the young men and women who are marching to their deaths that they will be greeted as liberators and that the enemy is so weak that it is in its 'last throes.' In other words, just keep spinning a slurry of fantasy and lies into U.S. policy."

I'm one of those people who believes a picture is worth a thousand words, and the one above certainly is powerful enough to make the point that there are Iraqis who are grateful for the liberation that has come to their country. And there are accounts of Iraqis who supported the War in Iraq early on. For instance, when I interviewed Steven Vincent on his book, In the Red Zone, on my show he shared of Iraqis who told him while he was embedded three times there, that they wanted the Americans to take Baghdad, but that they also knew Saddam Hussein had WMDs and "would kill them" (the Iraqis) in the battle, but nevertheless they wanted America to do it anyway.

But these kinds of accounts are seldom reported by the MSM. That's why we have to do it.

© Sharon Hughes 2005


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