Archive for the 'Dick Cheney' Category
June 12th, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
I am sure we will be arguing until November whether putting John McCain in the White House would represent a George Bush third term. McCain says no but his comments, policies, and possible personnel choices say yes. His latest:
Asked whether he’d be interested in Cheney had the vice president not
already have served under Bush for two terms, McCain said: “I don’t
know if I would want him as vice president. He and I have the same
strengths. But to serve in other capacities? Hell, yeah.”
What would be worse, 4 more years of Bush or 4 more years of Cheney pulling the strings in the White House?
January 31st, 2008 by Bob Schwartz
I just finished up a long day behind the wheel so I don’t have much time but I did come across a few interesting tidbits besides the Shell Oil poverty post below.
It’s been a good week for Conservative Republican scourge John McCain who not only picked up the endorsements of Rudy Giuliani earlier this week and Arnold Schwarzenegger today, he also gained another reason for me to like him just a bit more (not enough to vote for him though). You can now add Michelle Malkin to other wingnuts including Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter that would rather have a root canal than support McCain.
Speaking of Limbaugh, Darth Cheney appeared on his show yesterday to push for telecom immunity as part of the FISA legislation working its way around Congress.
CHENEY: People who don’t want to — I guess want to leave open the possibility that the trial lawyers can go after a big company that may have helped. Those companies helped specifically at our request, and they’ve done yeoman duty for the country, and this is the so-called terrorist surveillance program, one of the things it was called earlier. It’s just absolutely essential to know who in the United States is talking to Al-Qaeda. It’s a program that’s been very well managed. We haven’t violated anybody’s civil liberties. It’s in fact a good piece of legislation.
So Dick, if nobody has violated anyone’s civil liberties, why do they need immunity?
And finally, many have been touting the success of the surge in Iraq and while the effectiveness of this campaign can and is being debated, that little problem in Afghanistan hasn’t gone away either. It seems that bastion of civil and human rights we created after kicking out the Taliban is working just fine.
Afghanistan sentences journalist to death for downloading report on women’s rights
How’s that for progress?
November 5th, 2007 by Bob Schwartz
You might want to stay indoors for a few days.
Vice President Dick Cheney is back in Central South Dakota today – and as always, he is hunting birds, not votes.
Cheney arrived aboard Air Force 2, which landed, coming in from the south, at about 10:58 a.m. at the Pierre Regional Airport. He is making his annual pheasant hunting trip to Central South Dakota, where he stays at a private hunting resort in the Gettysburg area.
About a dozen aides and military personnel exited the plane from the rear before Cheney came out of the front passenger door, down the stairs and into a black suburban. He did not wave.
A 12-vehicle caravan that included law enforcement vehicles, an ambulance and suburbans left the airport through a north gate.
Cheney has gone pheasant hunting in Central South Dakota all seven years that he has been vice president. He is expected to stay in the area for a few days.
I had received notice last week from a displaced South Dakotan staying at a hotel in Pierre that something was going on in our fine capitol, now we know what it is.
In related news, I am sure hunters don’t like it when their prey fights back.
A deer gored a man Sunday afternoon while he was hunting with a friend in between Craig and Meeker.
A spokesperson for the Division of Wildlife says the hunter shot the deer and went to get it. When he approached it, the deer jumped up, charged the man and gored him.
The man’s friend drove him to a hospital. He was later airlifted to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction.
The man’s name and condition have not been released.
Wildlife officials say they haven’t seen something like this happen in at least four years.
They remind hunters to be careful because injured animals can be dangerous.
November 6th, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
Especially if you live in the Pierre area. Dick Cheney is coming to South Dakota for his first hunting trip since he “accidentally” shot his hunting companion. Cheney will be flying into Pierre tomorrow (election day?) for several days of target practice, oops hunting, at a local private lodge.
October 8th, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
Here’s something you won’t see much of in the big city…
This is a photo of the annual buffalo roundup in Custer State Park where the nearly 1300 free roaming buffalo in the park are rounded up each year for vaccinations and disease testing.
September 13th, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
Dick Cheney and Josh Bolten where on Capitol Hill yesterday attempting some damage control when they met with members of their own party trying to get them to go along with King George’s plan to prosecute suspected terrorists (a plan that has long since been set in motion). It seems the administration is having a hard time following one article of the Geneva Convention in particular.
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” of detainees. The Bush administration had maintained that those protections did not apply to prisoners captured in the U.S. counterterrorism campaign, but allies and human rights groups had criticized some U.S. interrogation practices, including simulated drowning.
One person that the Bush Administration might have a hard time convincing happens to be John McCain who knows a little bit about being held captive by a group that didn’t follow that article.
That “is still the area we are farthest apart on,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters.
It will be interesting to see how much torture King George and Co. will be able to get approved through Congress. To bad, as usual, they break the law first and then attempt to make it legal after the fact. No wonder members of the CIA are taking out legal insurance.
August 21st, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
According to Dick Cheney, that’s the number of terrorist supporters living in Connecticut. In other words that is the number of votes Ned Lamont received in the Democratic primary.
(From a Ted Kennedy action mailing list via Crooks And Liars)
August 14th, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
What does the Bush Administration do to turn a negative into a positve. They play the terror card and that is exactly what Dick Cheney is an expert at doing. Dan Froomkin documents Cheney’s scare tactics regarding the Bush war advocate Joe Lieberman’s defeat in an article in todays Washington Post.
By insinuating that the sizeable majority of American voters who oppose the war in Iraq are aiding and abetting the enemy, Vice President Cheney on Wednesday may have crossed the line that separates legitimate political discourse from hysteria.Cheney’s comments came in a highly unusual conference call with reporters, part of an extensively orchestrated and largely successful Republican effort to spin the obviously anti-Bush message of Ned Lamont’s victory over presidential enabler Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary.
In making the case that Lieberman’s defeat was actually an enormous boost for Republicans, the customarily furtive vice president let loose not with compelling argument, but unsupported invective.
Voters who supported Lamont’s antiwar campaign in the Democratic primary were giving “the Al Qaeda types” exactly what they wanted, Cheney said. And as a result the Democratic Party, he asserted, now stands for a wholesale retreat in the broader campaign against terror.
When you can’t beat them, spin the truth to scare them…
August 11th, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
That is the new talking point by the GOP in the wake of the Lamont victory in Connecticut. The message being spewed by everyone with an elephant lapel pin is that the Democrats don’t want to fight terror and if they win in November the terrorists win as well.
Dick “One Percent” Cheney fired the first salvo in a telephone interview yesterday with wire service reporters:
The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task. And when we see the Democratic Party reject one of its own, a man they selected to be their vice presidential nominee just a few short years ago, it would seem to say a lot about the state the party is in today if that’s becoming the dominant view of the Democratic Party, the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won’t — we can’t be. So we have to be actively engaged not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but on a global basis if we’re going to succeed in prevailing in this long-term conflict. So it’s an unfortunate development, I think, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy.
Cheney, and now by extension every right-wing pundit that “Faux News” can round up for an interview wants to paint the Democrats as weak on terror because they are calling for the downsizing and eventual pullout of troops from Iraq and these pundits want the country to believe that the Lieberman defeat was proof that the far left, if winners in November would lead the US down the path of destruction at the hands of terrorists.
Now lets look at the facts, the majority of Americans want the US out of Iraq. It is a war based on lies and horrible intelligence that had up until we invaded, posed no serious threat to our national security. But since our invasion, over 2500 US troops have been killed, the country has become a killing zone for innocent civilians, and the lack of control over the area has allowed it to now become a proving ground for terrorist and extremists.
Because of our occupation of Iraq, Iran has had their biggest enemy in the area neutralized and the Iranians are now free to push their influence to the farthest reaches of the region as is being witnessed by their continued support of Hezbollah against Israel and their nuclear posturing with the US and the UN. They realize and probably rightly so, that with the US spread so thinly by the ongoing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, the worst thing that can be thrown at them are weak and ineffective UN resolutions.
And all of this is not even discussing that nut in North Korea, who decides from time to time whenever he feels like he isn’t getting enough attention, to lob a few mid and long range missiles in the air to let the world know he is still around.
The Democratic call for withdrawal from Iraq has nothing to do with the fight on terror and everything to do with getting our troops out of an untenable situation that is headed towards civil war. And while we are throwing most of our military resources at this self inflicted wound, the real crazies around the world are arming for the next shot that will be fired in the war on terror. We seemingly got lucky yesterday when the British foiled a possible operation aimed at us but luck only goes so far.
I am sorry to pee on the Cheerios of all the Bush/Cheney Kool-Aid drinkers, the Lamont win was a referendum by Connecticut voters against George Bush and his cronies and not part of some far left wing movement that threatens the safety of America. Democrats along with a growing majority of Americans have come to realize that Bush’s attempt at the fight against terror is ineffective at best and criminal at worst and that it is time to change tactics. The Lieberman loss could be only the first domino to fall as part of that Bush backlash with the remainder falling in November.
August 3rd, 2006 by Bob Schwartz
Vanity Fair has a story today documenting the timeline of the morning of 9/11 taken for the NORAD tapes. Other than being an interesting look into the events of the morning, some supposed facts given by the Administration are also called into question.
As I wrote about yesterday, the 9/11 commission has called into question portions of the testimony given by the DOD and NORAD during the hearings and the Vanity Fair article seems to back up the commission’s concerns.
As the tapes reveal in stark detail, parts of [Colonel Alan] Scott’s and [Major General Larry] Arnold’s testimony were misleading, and others simply false. At 9:16 a.m., when Arnold and Marr had supposedly begun their tracking of United 93, the plane had not yet been hijacked. In fact, NEADS wouldn’t get word about United 93 for another 51 minutes. And while NORAD commanders did, indeed, order the Langley fighters to scramble at 9:24, as Scott and Arnold testified, it was not in response to the hijacking of American 77 or United 93. Rather, they were chasing a ghost. NEADS was entering the most chaotic period of the morning.
Also being called into question are Dick Cheney and the Administration’s so-called tough decisions of that morning.
In his bunker under the White House, Vice President Cheney was not notified about United 93 until 10:02–only one minute before the airliner impacted the ground. Yet it was with dark bravado that the vice president and others in the Bush administration would later recount sober deliberations about the prospect of shooting down United 93. “Very, very tough decision, and the president understood the magnitude of that decision,” Bush’s then chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC News.Cheney echoed, “The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it’s an order that had never been given before.” And it wasn’t on 9/11, either.
President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which–though no one knew it at the time–was 15 minutes after the attack was over.
But comments such as those above were repeated by other administration and military figures in the weeks and months following 9/11, forging the notion that only the passengers’ counterattack against their hijackers prevented an inevitable shootdown of United 93 (and convincing conspiracy theorists that the government did, indeed, secretly shoot it down). The recordings tell a different story, and not only because United 93 had crashed before anyone in the military chain of command even knew it had been hijacked.
At what feels on the tapes like the moment of truth, what comes back down the chain of command, instead of clearance to fire, is a resounding sense of caution. Despite the fact that NEADS believes there may be as many as five suspected hijacked aircraft still in the air at this point–one from Canada, the new one bearing down fast on Washington, the phantom American 11, Delta 1989, and United 93–the answer to Nasypany’s question about rules of engagement comes back in no uncertain terms, as you hear him relay to the ops floor.
10:10:31
NASYPANY (to floor): Negative. Negative clearance to shoot…. Goddammit!…
FOX: I’m not really worried about code words at this point.
NASYPANY: F*** the code words. That’s perishable information. Negative clearance to fire.
What that above information shows is just how heroic the passengers of flight 93 actually were. Cheney has said that their actions were the only thing that prevented the Administration from having to order the shooting down of a commercial aircraft when in fact the flight 93 heroism was the only thing that prevented the terrorists on that flight from carrying out their mission and further exposing the Administration’s indecision as the they didn’t actually get around to giving the order until 15 minutes after the attacks had ended.
(h/t Daily KOS)
Technorati Tags: Dick Cheney, Flight 93, NORAD, 9/11
