<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div>Ah, yes . . .</div><div><br></div><div>Who better to turn to for guidance concerning foreign policy and military advice than . . . </div><div><br></div><div>Dick "Five Deferments During Vietnam" Cheney.</div><div><br></div><div>Why rely on the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel . . . each of which have military combat experience.</div><div><br><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)</span></div><div><a href="http://www.moscowcares.com/" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000">http://www.MoscowCares.com</font></a></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></div><div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Tom Hansen</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Moscow, Idaho</span></div></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"There's room at the top they are telling you still.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">If you want to be like the folks on the hill."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">- John Lennon</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></div></div><div><br>On Jul 2, 2014, at 9:57 AM, "Rosemary Huskey" <<a href="mailto:donaldrose@cpcinternet.com">donaldrose@cpcinternet.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12 (filtered medium)"><style><!--
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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--><div class="WordSection1"><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">Maureen Dowd, writing for the New York Times certainly nails this topic.<o:p></o:p></span></p><h2>My Head’s Exploding<o:p></o:p></h2><h1>Is That the Iraq Drumbeat From Cheney & Co. Again?<o:p></o:p></h1><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">WASHINGTON — W. cut off Dick Cheney.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">Why can’t we?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">Who would have thought that Iraq imploding would give the mountebanks who tricked us into war a chance to rear their heads and seek rehabilitation — somehow grabbing onto the hellish spiral as proof that they were right in their original wrongness?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">But, then, they did always create their own reality spun from grandiosity.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">They are shamefully showcased on cable TV, which has so much airtime to fill that it doesn’t care if it’s hot air. They are once more pounding on the fear button and warning that America needs to attack or risk being emasculated by Middle Eastern terrorists. Doesn’t Vice know that most Americans, especially the Bushes, cannot stand his demented scaremongering anymore? Even Fox News anchors are now pressing him with skeptical questions about the war.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">Asked by Fox’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck if he thought we “could be on track for something worse than 9/11,” <a href="http://video.foxnews.com/v/3641318170001/dick-cheney-on-crisis-in-iraq/#sp=show-clips&v=3641318170001" title="A video">Cheney replied</a>, “I think that’s a possibility.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text" id="story-continues-2"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">He’s always busy predicting another 9/11. Too bad he and W. ignored warnings about the first one. Cheney is not only responsible for Iraq melting down and Afghanistan being mucked up. He can also claim credit for so exhausting John Wayne’s America that a skeptic on military intervention, Rand Paul, is a credible candidate for the G.O.P. nomination.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">That causes the man without a pulse to pulsate with bile. Shooting Paul in the face, Cheney told Fox: “The Republican Party traditionally has had the reputation as the go-to guys with respect to national security, and we want to reclaim that mantle for the party.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">Darth Vader is campaigning for validation with his cowboy hat and “Sith apprentice,” as Jon Stewart calls Liz Cheney. Liz acted in her failed Wyoming Senate bid as Dick did with the globe: swaggering and pre-emptorally blowing off allies and foes. So she has her own fences to mend if she wants a career in politics.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">Their idea of a charm offensive is to growl and spit and create something called The Alliance for a Strong America, a group demanding a more chesty foreign policy in a statement redolent of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130112235337/http:/www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm">the manifesto that neocons and other Republicans waved</a> back during the Clinton administration. Speaking to Fox News’s Megyn Kelly and to conservative radio host Chris Salcedo, Liz blamed President Obama for the chaos wrought by her father and W., basely claiming that he was intentionally trying to weaken America. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">When Bill Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it was “unseemly” for Dick Cheney to attack the Obama administration “for not doing an adequate job of cleaning up the mess that he made,” the venomous Liz tweeted “@billclinton calls Dick Cheney ‘unseemly.’ Well, I guess he would know.” (Not much of a denial by Liz.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text" id="story-continues-3"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">The creepy comeback scenario is playing out with the Cheneys, Paul Wolfowitz (who absurdly rejects the moniker of “architect,”) Bill Kristol, Paul Bremer, Robert Kagan (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/us/politics/historians-critique-of-obama-foreign-policy-is-brought-alive-by-events-in-iraq.html">who prefers the term “liberal interventionist” to “neocon”</a>) and Elliott Abrams (who actually had the chutzpah to write <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-man-who-broke-the-middle-east-108140.html#.U7NKWo1dWE4">a Politico Magazine piece about Obama</a> titled “The Man Who Broke the Middle East”).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">As a cherry on top of our $3 trillion disaster, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/world/middleeast/for-iraq-potential-leader-with-a-tarnished-past.html">there on the front page of The Times on Tuesday</a> was Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons’ cagey partner in fakery and initial choice to replace Saddam Hussein.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">“He took millions of dollars from the C.I.A., founded and was accused of defrauding the second-biggest bank in Jordan and sold the Bush administration a bill of goods on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” Rod Nordland wrote. Yet now Chalabi is a serious candidate for prime minister.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">In his book about Chalabi, “Arrows of the Night,” Richard Bonin, a “60 Minutes” producer, wrote this about the secular Shiite who managed to manipulate Washington into getting rid of Saddam, thinking he could return and take his place: “There has never been a foreigner more crucially involved in a decision by the United States to go to war than Chalabi.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">When Bonin asked Chalabi who used whom, in his unholy alliance with the neocons who later scorned him, he answered: “It was a commonality of interest, a convergence of conceptions about the future.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">Just when you thought our wreck in Iraq could not get any more sulfurous, The Times’s James Risen revealed that a State Department inquiry into the out-of-control Blackwater protection brigade was stifled by U.S. diplomats in Baghdad and then abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager threatened “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text" id="story-continues-6"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">Asked on HuffPost Live on Tuesday whether Cheney was immoral or amoral, Lawrence Wilkerson, the regretful former aide to Colin Powell, replied amoral.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">“Immorality is something that can be ferreted out, checked and balanced,” he said. “Amorality is an altogether different affair, especially when you’re exploiting the politics of fear in order to carry out state purposes, which is what Dick Cheney’s forte is.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-body-text"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">At least the neocons finally found the W.M.D. — warped mouthy discourse. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="story-print-citation"><span style="font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 2, 2014, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: My Head’s Exploding. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>=======================================================</span><br><span> List services made available by First Step Internet,</span><br><span> serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.</span><br><span> <a href="http://www.fsr.net">http://www.fsr.net</a></span><br><span> <a href="mailto:Vision2020@moscow.com">mailto:Vision2020@moscow.com</a></span><br><span>=======================================================</span></div></blockquote></div></body></html>