Dionne on the attack
Source: Washington Post
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13425-2004Oct6.html
Title: "Switching Stories"
Date: October 7, 2004
When you spend so much time torturing the truth, it's hard to keep your story straight -- or even remember what you just said.
The most remarkable moment in Tuesday's debate between Vice President Cheney and Sen. John Edwards came when Cheney issued a blanket denial of the obvious.
Edwards . . . declared that "there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th. Period. The 9/11 Commission has said that's true. Colin Powell has said it's true. But the vice president keeps suggesting that there is."
What Cheney said next was, literally, incredible: "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
This is the same Cheney who, just minutes before, in the very same debate, had defended the attack on Iraq by declaring flatly that Saddam Hussein "had an established relationship with al Qaeda." Hello? If that is not a "suggestion" of a connection, what is?
Well, this: On Sept. 14, 2003, Cheney said Iraq was at the heart of "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
Washington Post
Writing for the
Washington Post, E. J. Dionne, Jr., keeps his journalistic sights trained on the errors of the GOP campaign. Of course, when the Vice President of the United States of America comes before the nation in a televised debate with his election challenger and floats a ******** air-biscuit of such magnitude and purity, it tends to dominate the post-event discussion.
Unfortunately, the choice is never about honesty and lies, and these days focuses on deciding which version of political exaggeration, deception, and outright lies tends to offend or discourage a person the least.
Yet Americans, who have long decried the lies of politicians, have treated this wartime president drawn from the nightmares of Orwell and Goering with kid gloves, happy to equivocate and make excuses. So far this year it has been established that making literary observations (e.g. Goering) about and criticizing the economic record of this president equal hate speech, and are as morally-repugnant as fabricating an outright lie and staking that lie on the credibility of past, present, and future American armed services. That's right, highlighting the good and downplaying the bad--traditional politics allegedly reviled by the people--has been determined to be of the same moral and intellectual bases as fabrication, slander, and libel.
Can it possibly be that the United States has descended to such depths? Could it be we are, as a nation, giving license to our worst nightmares because we don't know any better? Ask a psychologist about such behavior in individuals: empowering what hurts a person is not considered a healthy state of being. What of a community?
The dawning hope is that the American giant is once again awake; perhaps groggy, but aware nonetheless of the difference between hypnopaedia and reality. The Cheney-Edwards debate may have torn away the cobwebs: suddenly the Bush administration has no quarter. As they cycle through the lies, the GOP is finding that only their handpicked audiences cued to cheer scripted considerations assembled by committee are swallowing the putrid concoction of truculent lies.
If the Cheney-Edwards debate made nothing else clear, it is that the central issue in this presidential election is becoming the administration's lack of credibility and its tendency to say whatever is convenient to make whatever case it is trying to make.
Day by day, we learn more and more about how the administration led the nation into war by distorting intelligence and twisting facts. A president who once condemned a mentality that declared "if it feels good, do it" has now embraced a related principle: "If it sounds good, say it."
Washington Post
There is, on the wind, the slightest tinge of the scent of triumph; the last month of the campaign finds the Bush administration finally in the hot seat, finally under the glaring lights, and as they wipe the sweat from their collective brow, it will be hard for a cabal that finds itself nesting in lies to come up with anything new. The GOP is in a footrace against time:
How long can we keep the numbers up? Are these last twenty-seven or so days to the election enough time for erosion to take away what Bush, Cheney, and the neoconservative league consider theirs by right?
The administration's story is falling apart. Bush and Cheney mercilessly attack their opponents and promote a climate of fear because they are finding it increasingly difficult to defend the choices they made and the words they have spoken.
Washington Post
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• Dionne, E. J. "Switching Stories". Washington Post, October 7, 2004; page A39. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13425-2004Oct6.html
