Who's Really Morally and Intellectually Challenged?
by Joseph L. Galloway
from Miami Herald
Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld took to the road this week trying to sell the message that Iraq is part of the war on terrorism and that anyone who thinks differently is morally or intellectually challenged.
With the president himself batting clean-up on Thursday, the dynamic duo and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the rounds of the conventions of the biggest national veterans' organizations -- the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., and the American Legion in Salt Lake City -- peddling the Bush administration's beleaguered line of bull to guaranteed friendly audiences.
Rumsfeld's message to the American Legion was that critics of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq and terrorism were guilty of ``moral or intellectual confusion about what is right or wrong.''
Cheney's sound bites out of the Reno gathering of the VFW included assertions that the federal-court ruling that warrantless wiretapping was unconstitutional was ''dead wrong.'' That ''sound policies by the president'' have prevented any more terrorist attacks on the United States since 9/11 and that the terrorists, whom he declared ''in the last throes'' last year, are now ``weakened and fractured, yet still lethal.''
These statements reflect the administration's persistent moral or intellectual confusion about what is and isn't true. From Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, we hear how well things are going in Iraq, under new democratic local management.
• In fact, Iraqis are dying by the thousands every month, Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias are growing stronger, ordinary Iraqis are lining up for passports to flee a civil war that the administration won't admit is happening and the American death toll is rising above 2,600.
• In fact, we are bogged down in a no-win, no-way-out war in part because our military commanders have been browbeaten into fighting it on the cheap, with perhaps half the number of troops they needed to get a grip on a fractious people before the place dissolved into anarchy, sectarian bloodshed and revenge-taking.
(The rest is here.)
from Miami Herald
Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld took to the road this week trying to sell the message that Iraq is part of the war on terrorism and that anyone who thinks differently is morally or intellectually challenged.
With the president himself batting clean-up on Thursday, the dynamic duo and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the rounds of the conventions of the biggest national veterans' organizations -- the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., and the American Legion in Salt Lake City -- peddling the Bush administration's beleaguered line of bull to guaranteed friendly audiences.
Rumsfeld's message to the American Legion was that critics of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq and terrorism were guilty of ``moral or intellectual confusion about what is right or wrong.''
Cheney's sound bites out of the Reno gathering of the VFW included assertions that the federal-court ruling that warrantless wiretapping was unconstitutional was ''dead wrong.'' That ''sound policies by the president'' have prevented any more terrorist attacks on the United States since 9/11 and that the terrorists, whom he declared ''in the last throes'' last year, are now ``weakened and fractured, yet still lethal.''
These statements reflect the administration's persistent moral or intellectual confusion about what is and isn't true. From Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, we hear how well things are going in Iraq, under new democratic local management.
• In fact, Iraqis are dying by the thousands every month, Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias are growing stronger, ordinary Iraqis are lining up for passports to flee a civil war that the administration won't admit is happening and the American death toll is rising above 2,600.
• In fact, we are bogged down in a no-win, no-way-out war in part because our military commanders have been browbeaten into fighting it on the cheap, with perhaps half the number of troops they needed to get a grip on a fractious people before the place dissolved into anarchy, sectarian bloodshed and revenge-taking.
(The rest is here.)
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