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Iraq and Cheney: So?

The longer he remains in office VP Cheney looks more and more like the awful man he is. Rigid, one-eyed, of questionable integrity and some would say downright evil...... probably learned during his years in the Nixon White House and something dealt with by Marie Coco in his piece "Nixon's Heir" on truthdig.com:

"Some days, there’s just no forgetting that Dick Cheney is still the vice president of the United States. We’ve had a few of these recently, with Cheney traveling to Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East on what might be called a goodwill mission, if the person making the trip were not Dick Cheney.

Many startling comments tumbled from the vice president’s lips. His verbal jousting with ABC’s Martha Raddatz over the recent National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that Iran had stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon around 2003 is one scary discussion. Examining this back-and-forth, you cannot help but conclude that Cheney does not put much stock in the NIE, and considers there to be little, if any, difference between the ongoing Iranian uranium enrichment program and a weapons program. It is all eerily reminiscent of the lack of distinction Cheney made between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the band of Afghanistan-based terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Of course, Cheney uses the interview to deliver the obligatory shake of his saber in Iran’s direction: “The president has made it clear that our objective is to make certain they do not acquire the capacity to produce nuclear weapons".

Cheney also declared that it didn’t really matter that two-thirds of Americans think the Iraq war wasn’t worth fighting—“So?” the vice president responded. After all, real leaders in a democracy don’t give a hoot about what the people think and don’t follow those cursed opinion polls. Given a second chance a few days later to elaborate on his point, Cheney likened President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon.

It takes one to know one, sort of."

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