Mutually-Assured Distraction

Salon's Joan Walsh pretty much has the Cheneys pegged. Last Sunday, America's most famous neocon tag team went on the talking head circuit to bash Democrats for doing the same exact things the Bush junta did.

As Walsh said, this is just the wind up for Cheney's eventual book tour to publicize his upcoming opus, "I Did it My Way, With Impunity, So Suck My Dick."

Cheney, as always, was as irony-deficient as Ann Coulter is food-deficient (just recently she called Vice President Joe Biden "a drunken Irishman"), so much so that you hope network television is merely putting Cheney and family on TV to serve as an ongoing object lesson in what not to do as regards foreign policy.

Sadly, that's not the case. ABC, Fox and virtually any other network actually think this waterboarding enthusiast is perfectly sane and provides a valuable conservative counterpoint to the evil, weak-kneed Democrat lib'ral thinking that could've gotten people killed on Christmas Day but didn't.

Funny thing is, I don't recall as many of those wet-legged lib'rals being given the red carpet treatment on the Sunday talk show in matters of national security when Bush and Cheney were getting us Boeing-bombed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania or when he was ginning up the case for war with Afghanistan or Iraq and fucking up both with the industry of the Ritz Brothers on crack cocaine.

So what's Obama done wrong, according to America's favorite Dick?

Well, we Mirandized the Underwear Bomber and are trying him in a civilian court, which is exactly what the Bush administration did with Richard Reid the Shoe Bomber. In fact, under Bush, we'd properly Mirandized and convicted 175 terrorist suspects.

Then Cheney made a startling admission: He went against his boss and openly called for torture, including waterboarding, essentially admitting that he was a war criminal.

But the bad apple doesn't fall far from the tree as Liz Cheney went on Fox on Valentine's Day to say that the Clinton administration's decision to try the 1993 WTC conspirators in civilian court led to 9/11.

Yes, she actually said that as if 2001-2009 was neatly excised from American history. The failures, in the Cheneys' addled mind, started with the Clinton administration and continue seamlessly with the Obama administration. There was no August 6th PDB, over a half a dozen foreign governments. That there wasn't a boob in the Oval Office who dismissed any and all warnings about al Qaida from the CIA, Richard Clarke, foreign governments so he could obsess about a country that was no threat to us whatsoever and had nothing to do with 9/11.

Glossed over by the Cheneys' selective memories is the fact that President Obama's initiatives had broken up al Qaida plots in Pakistan and Yemen and arrested the biggest Taliban leader since we invaded Afghanistan over eight years ago.

Basically, according to the neocons, the Jack Johnson administration will have to be twice as good as the last one (not that Obama should brag about that) to be considered half as good. Obama could singlehandedly smash terrorism all over the world and PNAC would say that Obama spitefully did it just to deprive Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater of war contracts.