What A Dick

Select clips from yesterday's Politico interview with former vice-president Dick Cheney:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Time's Joe Klein, essentially responding to Mr. Cheney on behalf of a large majority of Americans:

Let's leave aside the fact that if Dick Cheney and his alleged boss had been more vigilant - if they had listened to the outgoing Clinton [team in 2000] who warned about Al Qaeda, if they had paid attention to their own intelligence reports (notably the one on August 6, 2001) - the September 11 attacks might never have happened. Actually, I can't leave that aside...but in any case, it is sleazy in the extreme for Cheney to predict another terrorist attack. For several reasons:

1. Some sort of terrorist attack is likely, eventually, no matter who is President.
2. Cheney has done here what the Bush Administration did throughout: he has politicized terror. If another attack happens, it's Obama's fault. Disgraceful... and ungrateful, since it's only Obama's mercy that stands between Cheney and a really serious war crimes investigation. Which leads to...
3. The means that Cheney has supported to combat terror in the past, especially "enhanced" interogation techniques, are quite probably illegal. He is criticizing the Obama administration for not being willing to defy international law.
4. Cheney's track record of mismanagement in Iraq and Afghanistan - his sponsorship of Donald Rumsfeld, the worst Secretary of Defense in US history - disqualifies him from having any credible say on the security policies of his successor.

This is a man who should either be (a) scorned or (b) ignored.

He's bordering on wishing an attack on the United States so that he can scare Americans back into submission.

Fucking traitor sleazebag.