Former Vice President Dick Cheney delivered his speech on National Security the other day. Cheney delivered sharp criticism to the current administration’s limp-wristed approach to terrorism. The recently-minted Fox Nation website excerpted the top-10 thoughts from Cheney’s speech:
No. 10: The administration has found that it’s easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo. But it’s tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America’s national security.
No. 9: In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we’ve captured as, quote, “abducted.” Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the movies.
No. 8: If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field. And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for – our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.
No. 7: Yet having reserved for himself the authority to order enhanced interrogation after an emergency, you would think that President Obama would be less disdainful of what his predecessor authorized after 9/11. It’s almost gone unnoticed that the president has retained the power to order the same methods in the same circumstances. When they talk about interrogations, he and his administration speak as if they have resolved some great moral dilemma in how to extract critical information from terrorists. Instead they have put the decision off, while assigning a presumption of moral superiority to any decision they make in the future.
No. 6: To completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.
No. 5: This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the President himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the Left, “We brought it on ourselves.” It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so. Nor are terrorists or those who see them as victims exactly the best judges of America’s moral standards, one way or the other.
No. 4: Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance.
No. 3: To the very end of our administration, we kept al-Qaeda terrorists busy with other problems. We focused on getting their secrets, instead of sharing ours with them. And on our watch, they never hit this country again. After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.
No. 2: In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States. Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy.
No. 1: Critics of our policies are given to lecturing on the theme of being consistent with American values. But no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.
Courtesy Editors of Fox Nation.
Faux Brass: a class of former military officers who have shed the honor and pride of their commissions in favor of retreatist and defeatist policies.
“We’ve come to a moment in our history when party labels are unimportant. Philosophy is all important. Little men with loud voices cry doom, saying little is good in America. They create fear and uncertainty among us. Millions of Americans, especially our own sons and daughters, are seeking a cause they can believe in. There is a hunger in this country today — a hunger for spiritual guidance. People yearn once again to be proud of their country and proud of themselves, and to have confidence in themselves. And there’s every reason why they should be proud. Some may have failed America, but America has never failed us, and there is so much to be proud of in this land.” — Ronald Reagan
This is a map of the country from the 2004 presidential election where states carried by Bush are colored red and blue if carried by Kerry. The map of “red states” seems to dominate the country, since they cover far more area than the blue ones. However, this is a little misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations and most of the blue states have large ones. The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election where the majority wins.
Now, if we were to re-map the country using a cartography technique to distort state boundaries to account for the population of that state, we get a much different picture. Each state now has a hypothetical area in proportion to its population. Regardless of this distorted view, however, the Electoral college selected President Bush for his second term. The actual nationwide popular vote also went to Bush by a plurality of over six million votes.