The
Washington Post has a very long fact-checking piece on Sith Lord Cheney and Darth Cheney Jr.'s latest spewings upon the public stage, and I am terribly sorry for the uncivil description of the nice serial liar
slash torturer
slash unrepentant war criminal and his offspring, but given that he's not likely to be extradited to The Hague anytime soon, I guess he'll just have to make do with the slings and arrows of us little people who do not set up their own private intelligence operations in order to invent rationales and "evidence" for war that are too implausible for even the notoriously dodgy official American intelligence agencies to put their signature to. Mea culpa.
The Torture Twins went to the Weekly Standard for their latest bit, which is actually just a light edit of the same speech Dick the Greater has been giving for decades—he may have a new heart, but the bullshit circuits were soldered in nice and tight, they couldn't do squat about those:
It is undisputed, and has been confirmed repeatedly in Iraqi government documents captured after the invasion, that Saddam had deep, longstanding, far-reaching relationships with terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda and its affiliates.
As it turns out it is very disputed, in that most people who do not have
Cheney printed on their driver licenses dispute it plenty. The abject lack of evidence for such a claim is exactly why the Cheney White House went
hard against a U.S. ambassador who said what little evidence they did have was obviously fake, an action that resulted in the Cheney Group, aka Richard Armitage and Scooter Libby and Karl Rove et al., announcing to the world that his wife was a covert CIA agent. Ten years later no such evidence has been found, and while it is true that Iraq and al Qaeda groups "had ties" in that they were known to each other and at some points had contact with each other, the short version is that Hussein had little interest in groups that were not obligingly pro-him. Long version
here, short version Shut Up, Dick Cheney. That guy wants another war like an alcoholic wants another bottle.
Jump below the fold for more.
Al Qaeda presence in Iraq after the war that Cheney was so insistent upon getting, and al Qaeda presence in Iraq today, are a different story, and one that Richard "Dick" Cheney has no interest in except as an apple crate to stand on while he implores all the rest of us to recognize that It Is All Barack Obamas Fault. Think of Dick Cheney as America's Saddam Hussein; if there's a fact or a group out there that's not going to enrich his own power, then to hell with it and you. The Weekly Standard has been jolly old Baghdad Bob since long before any of us knew Baghdad Bob existed, and they're happy with that. They've found their niche.
Anyhoo, what were we going on about? Ah yes, Dick Cheney and the spawnling's new and omnipresent push to ... do something. Get us to recognize their genius? Push for a new war because the bombs help him sleep at night? Start the 2016 campaign off early with the identical "this Democratic president is ruining our military and our super-duper standing in the world" push that Cheney put himself in charge of when running against Al Gore, fifteenish years ago?
You don't have to listen to this bullheaded crank, media. I don't see Al Gore tromping through your airwaves like an escaped zoo animal looking for fresh zookeeper meat. Yes, I'm sure his talk of war and bombings and terrorism right the hell now if we don't do everything he says makes you feel all tingly inside, makes you feel nostalgic for the old days, but even setting aside the war criminal and prominent torture enthusiast parts, the man has been provably wrong about everything he has said for twenty years running. He's told the same lies for 20 years, he's shown no capacity for learning from decade after decade of shit policy resulting in shit results; he's just wrong. Have a Magic 8 Ball on the air to talk about national security, at least it would only be wrong some of the time. What the hell is wrong with you?
There's got to be a point, as a policymaker, that being the shittiest policy crafter ever catches up to you. If you've been wrong on a subject for, say, 20 long years, there has got to be a point where the nice people with the television cameras and the microphones say You know what? This person is the shittiest policy crafter ever, and it would be personally irresponsible of us to keep listening to him.
Dick Cheney is the embodiment of that person. He lied, and we caught him lying. He lied more, and we caught him again. He championed a war that caused massive bloodshed and gained us nothing but a crater of debts, and we found none of the weapons he said would be found, and found none of the stability he vowed we would find, and he personally worked to turn the country into a worse and meaner place of faux-nationalism and prepubescent diplomacy and child testicle-crushing, if the president thought he needed to crush a child's testicles. We can't put him in prison, but we can keep him off our goddamn airwaves, which for him would be an even worse punishment.