The outrageous offenses against Richard Cheney
From Greenwald's Salon.com column:
Over the weekend, Dick Cheney -- at John King's prodding -- accused Barack Obama of, among other things, lying to the public about his proposed domestic policies, taking advantage of the financial crisis to foist enlarged government on unsuspecting citizens, and leaving us all more vulnerable to slaughter by the Terrorists.  When asked about those comments, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said:  "I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy, so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal. . . . Not taking economic advice from Dick Cheney might be the best possible outcome of yesterday's interview."
I'm not going to try to defend Dick Cheney, former VP of USA. God knows he doesn't represent the true conservative values (small government and balanced budget).
And I'm not going to attack the administration on their increasing display of arrogance and high-handedness, with their "I won" comment and what-not.
But I am going to say why the White House's response was inappropriate and wrong: Dick Cheney's criticism was specific, policy-oriented criticism. Answering that with either a joke (highly inappropriate in official communications, unless immediately followed by a serious answer), or an ad hominem attack (exactly what did Cheney and Bush administration do wrong that led to the recession? Nothing indicates that Cheney somehow lacks business acumen to tell a bad policy when he sees it; as for the recession, the federal reserve has more to do with the business cycle than the office of president and vice president), was cowardly and, well, evasive.
But then, you would expect that from liberals.
March 20th, 2009
God knows he doesn’t represent the true conservative values (small government and balanced budget).
His record in Congress certainly suggests that a Cheney administration would have been much, much better on those issues than the Bush administration was. When Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative,” he was trying overcome the view that nasty old Republicans like Cheney wanted to take money away from kids (i.e., abolish the Department of Education), the elderly (i.e., reduce entitlement spending), fire a bunch of hard working indispensable government employees (i.e., do the right thing), and spend whatever pittance of a federal budget there was on superbly designed weapons systems (i.e., ibid).
March 21st, 2009
Huh. What do you know. I just assumed Cheney agreed with Bush, being his vice president and all. But it does sounds like he would have been a much better president. I guess I need to read up on what he actually did, not what the liberal media tries to portray him as.
March 21st, 2009
Well, Elliott’s right. From Wikipedia: “Cheney’s most immediate issue as Secretary of Defense was the Department of Defense budget. Cheney deemed it appropriate to cut the budget and downsize the military, following President Ronald Reagan’s peacetime defense buildup at the height of the Cold War.”
I can’t think of many people who would choose to shrink his “empire” when there is an outside pressure to expand it. And what’s amazing is he managed to accomplish that while waging the first Gulf War.
March 25th, 2009
For what it’s worth, Karl Rove agrees: Cheney’s comments should have been responded to seriously on its merits, not in jest (http://foxnews.com/video?playerId=videolandingpage&maven_playlistId=9ccf127ad00c53ab8708e18e946bf50e83958340&referralPlaylistId=9ccf127ad00c53ab8708e18e946bf50e83958340&referralObject=3833718).