Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Does Cheney Know Something Obama Doesn't?





Pat Buchanan does his best to defend Cheney's latest rant at Obama - for implementing the policies on which ran and was elected - but he pushes it way too far when he claims that Cheney might have access to intelligence which President Obama does not.

But that's where you find yourself when you try to defend a Vice President who seems to be betting an another attack on American soil so that he can say, "I told you so!"

And I am really pleased that - in the second video - Lawrence O'Donnell picks up on the same point I picked up on yesterday. It really is bizarre that Cheney should state that Bush "basically" authorised the programme. It really does raise the question of just what Cheney told Bush that programme actually entailed.

O'Donnell thinks that Cheney is becoming wary in case of any future trial he might face and Robertson argues that Cheney would welcome a trial.

I find Robertson's position on this to be ludicrous. I think Cheney is sounding off in the hope of scaring Obama away from prosecutions. There's no way Cheney wants a trial, as he's already as good as plead guilty in the public arena.

UPDATE:

It's really interesting that even Joe Liebermann is not backing Cheney on this one:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on Monday defended President Barack Obama against former Vice President Dick Cheney’s claims that the Obama administration has made the country less safe.

“We're not less safe,” said Lieberman, who was one of Obama’s leading critics on national security during the presidential campaign.

“Our guard is up. In fact, I'd say that when it came to Afghanistan, obviously, this Obama administration has put more resources into the fight against terrorism than had previously been the case,” Lieberman added in an interview on MSNBC. “On balance, we remain as safe as we can possibly be in a world in which there is Islamist extremists who want to attack us.”
Could Cheney's political tent possibly get any smaller?

2 comments:

Steel Phoenix said...

Pat goes a bit far into conjecture, but he may not be too far off. We saw under Bush that when people were silenced within the administration, they often sought a sympathetic ear in order to leak information. After people like Tenet left, they still knew what was going on. My thought is that it isn't so much that the CIA is hiding information from Obama, but that there is a faction that is not happy to his not seeing things their way. Think about all of those people who were involved in the programs Obama is trying to shut down, like torture. They are mostly Cheney programs.

Lieberman is just ass kissing. I'd believe Cheney before I'd believe that snake.

Kel said...

My thought is that it isn't so much that the CIA is hiding information from Obama, but that there is a faction that is not happy to his not seeing things their way.That's what I think as well. I think there is a worry that they went too far and a feeling that they might now be in the firing line, despite Obama's reassurances.

And Cheney certainly feels the heat at the moment. But he has no right to almost publicly wish that the US could be attacked so that he can say, "I told you so." I can take no other reading from his actions at the moment. He's framing this debate in such a way that an attack would suit his purposes. I find that disgraceful.