If you haven’t read the transcript of Dick Cheney’s speech yesterday in Washington, you owe it to yourself to take a look. It’s rare to see a constitutional officer deliver such breathtakingly dishonest remarks in public. Cheap shots, demonstrable falsehoods, over-the-top rhetoric, straight-faced mendacity … it’s all here, in about 600 words. If it weren’t pathological, it’d almost be impressive.
“[I]n Washington you can ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate. But in the last several weeks we have seen a wild departure from that tradition.”
It’s like watching a Twilight Zone episode. A man who’s completely abandoned “truthfulness and good faith” is accusing others of dishonesty and exploiting the war for political gain. It’s as if Shaquille O’Neal mocked someone for being tall.
Cheney summarized all of the new WH talking points nicely: Dems had the same intelligence, now they’re contradicting themselves, and they’re undermining the troops. The claims have no basis in reality, but then again, that’s never stopped Cheney before.
But instead of analyzing every word of Cheney’s speech, I wanted to highlight one sentence that has the most political salience.
“American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures…and back home a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie.”
What Cheney doesn’t seem to appreciate is that those “few opportunists” he’s dismissing happen to be a majority of the country. While the VP wasn’t looking, the concerns raised by congressional Democrats and the concerns raised by regular ol’ outside-the-beltway Americans became the exact same thing. It might make the White House “comeback” strategy a little tricky.
Over the last week, two national polls (Gallup and NBC/WSJ) showed a clear majority of the country now believes that Bush deliberately misled the country into the war. Cheney can try, but it’s tough to reject the beliefs of 100 million people and tell them to stop believing their lying eyes.
Indeed, the new WH offensive has a variety of flaws (it relies on blatant falsehoods, for example), but among the more serious political problems is its ability to alienate the very people the Bush gang wants to win over.
In 2002 and 2003, most Americans, like many Democrats in Congress, heard their president and believed that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat with WMD and ties to al Queda. A majority supported invading Iraq in order to keep the United States safe. Since then, Americans have learned a lot — including inconvenient truths the administration suppressed before the war — and now they’re not happy. The more they discover, the more the electorate grows angry and disappointed, and the more support for war plummets.
According to the new Bush/Cheney talking points, these Americans are not only unpatriotic, they’re hypocrites. If your opinion changes as you learn facts, Bush and Cheney insist, then you’re contradicting yourself — and you’re hurting the troops. Left with few choices, this is the strategy the geniuses at the White House have come up with.
If the White House was simply targeting Harry Reid and John Kerry, it’d be crass, cynical, and wrong. But as it turns out, the Bush gang is inadvertently picking a fight with everyone who believes the war was a mistake, which means the Bush gang has a bigger fight on its hands than they realize.