Dick Cheney, who really needs to go back to his undisclosed location and stay there:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.
In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.
And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.
“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.
Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”
In Cheney’s world, the only way you can beat the evil terrorists is to be as evil than they are.
But let’s also not miss how this sentiment is absolutely a cover for authoritarianism at home, and empire abroad.
Government always wants more control over its people, and the “War on Terror” offered the opportunity for unprecedented control. The likes of Cheney is very, very reluctant to give that up.
Similarly, when our ambitions in the Middle East include making sure the oil keeps flowing and taking a poke at Iran - of course we have to remain on the offensive with “the terrorists,” who live over there, and thus necessitate our perpetual presence there.
But mostly, it’s just partisan. Notes David Kurtz over at TPM:
the GOP’s plan to regain political viability in the short term rests on two disaster scenarios: the failure of the financial rescue efforts (stimulus, TARP, and other bailouts) to stave off complete economic collapse and a new mass casualty terrorist attack — both of which they are positioning themselves to blame Obama for.
Without one of those two, they have to figure it’s going to be a long time wandering in the political wilderness. Now think about the curdling effect, the blight on the soul that comes with rooting for such disasters to befall your country. The rot is now eating at the party’s very core.
And dangerous for the country itself.
