Posted by
Bill Crawford on Friday, May 15, 2009 12:40:29 PM
The time honored tradition of fading into the background and allowing your successors to work in the White House was broken long ago. Jimmy Carter poked his fingers through the dam in the early 1980's. Bill Clinton, who never did learn how to shut up, busted the dam wide open, starting with his second farewell speech in Washington D.C.- which took place the same time as the first of Bush's inaugural balls were starting.
So what brought Cheney out? What started the torments anew at the editorial boards of most of our urban newspapers?
I'll tell you why. Obama's people decided to make political hay out of a national security issue. Let's declassify the interrogation memos from 9/11- releasing to the world exactly what our techniques were, in case Al Queda wants to train themselves for us in the future. Let's hold back the results, though. We'll just send out the parts that make the old guys look bad.
So the ex-VP called them on it. In for a penny, in for a pound. You've already dumped the most sensitive part into the mainstream, so finish the job. Release the rest, he said. Show them what we got out of it. And surely if there was nothing to that, that would have been part of the original dump- you can bet your Rahm Emmanuel on that.
Look folks, I understand there are a certain percentage of you that think this war was inappropriate from the start. And another percentage that thinks that it has gone into some sort of remission. I am part of the smaller group that realizes that not only is this war not over, it has yet to see it's worst days.
So fight it we must. I will not bear my children any other future. I'll be happy to fight it for your children for you, too- even if I get nothing but derision and ingratitude from the likes of you.
We still are surrounded by two large oceans, and it allows many of us to maintain some sort of ignorance about how most of the rest of the planet was shaved by a drunken barber. I can understand that.
You'll excuse me if I don't go along. If you wish to define Dick Cheney as void of conviction and pose him as some sort of rabid lunatic, there is nothing I can do about that, either.
But if Republicans get back into power and you ask them (again) to "reach across the aisle" and their only reaction is to urinate on your pants leg, let's just say that you asked for it.
This must be the "postpartisan unity" that Obama promised so fervently. Yeah, I see it.