I've listened long enough to Dick Cheney's pretenses to knowing more about what it means to command in wartime than veterans who've been there and done that.
Cheney's self-projected war wisdom seems most accurately defined by the pipe dreams of the Project For a New American Century with which he has an intimate history.
Cheney's insistance that we stand by and let slip our reverence for the Constitution or face another major attack on the U.S.A. is dishonest fear-mongering at its worst.
Mr. Cheney, when it comes to real war and real combat, you haven't been there. You haven't done that. It's all in a political and foreign policy abstract for you.
Pretending to speak as someone who has been there and has done that demonstrates the desparation of ignorant arrogance.
Giving public speeches only before narrow and restricted audiences - preaching to your choir - in which you purport great wisdom about leadership is part and parcel of the shallowness by which you pretend to govern and administer your responsibilities.
The reason for that in view of your lack of personal military experience is the intellectual hubris and academic assumptions so amply expressed by your fellow theorists at the Project For a New American Century.
Book learning is still just book learning and a college education without on-the-job experience and exposure is still limited to textbooks and theories.
A Vice President's inability to express empathy with the American military's day-to-day reality continues to broadcast much more powerfully and loudly than denunciations of critics who have accurately pointed out who is fit or unfit for leadership - particularly in a military role.
You and the President continue a stubborn insistence that America is safer because of Iraq and 130,000+ troops in Iraq.
In partnering with George Bush, who thinks that substance communicates itself in swagger, bravado and foolish stubbornness, you and he pretend to the wisdom of presidential predecessors who actually demonstrated wise wartime leadership.
However, you two reveal something more like the rash arrogance of George Armstrong Custer.
Your political advisors have been so blatantly devious, manipulative, and disingenuous that it is no longer possible to separate the Commander-in-Chief and his V.P. from their political managers.
The pretense at aloofness and no connection to swift-bloating administration critics with lies is loudly and obviously a pretense. In truth you rely on swift-bloat lies.
Mr. Cheney, in our immediate future the consequences of a terrorist attack on this country will be the responsibility of the Bush administration. You will know it and know that the country knows it.
An attack will have occurred the impact of which could have been diminished if you had given a higher priority to America's need for greater preparation and homeland protection while on your watch and not wasted our resources in a singularly misguided and mismanaged context in Iraq.
An attack will have occurred while the American Military is occupied abroad to a degree of expenditure that has left the Pentagon over which you and George preside struggling to manage and sustain.
If an attack could have been avoided, its enormity reduced and the consequences made less dreadful had there been a stronger presence of Active Duty, Reserve and National Guard troops within our own boundaries.
All the foolishness about Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sadam/Osama linkage and nation-building in Iraq will become powerfully insignificant.
We the people will justifiably hold the Bush Administration responsible and no amount of yours and George's on-going flip-flops about Iraq; no amount of equating the War on Terrorism with the War in Iraq as one and the same and no amount of PNAC theorizing is going to change that.
You won't be able to blame Clinton, Democrats or Supreme Court Judges.
You won't even be able to blame Rumsfeld, The CIA, The NSA or whistleblowers.
You won't be able to attack the messengers, discredit the critics or shift the blame to someone else.
John Edwards was right. There ARE two America's Mr. Vice President.
One is our electorate in which lives and votes the entire spectrum of American life - the rich and the poor, the employed as well as the unemployed, the insured and the uninsured, the veterans and those who did not serve, the military members and the families who support and pray for them.
The Other America are those current elected officials who have demonstrated a fear of straight talk,
an unwillingness to accept responsibility,
and a willingness to manipulate and even falsify truth in an all-out attempt to stay in office.
They include elected Republican politicians who have compromised legitimate conservative values in an unwise desire to keep a Republican President in office regardless of his ability.
You can see them on the talk shows struggling to put a positive spin on administration policies, behaviors, rationales and its unending stream of blunders and failures.
The Other America is led by those who restrict their public appearances and speeches to hand-picked audiences ...
who are afraid to face disagreement and confront the hard questions honestly and publicly ...
who think that swift-bloat attacks solve problems by discrediting the messengers and destroying careers of whistle-blowers.
The Other America are those who fire employees for political opinions,
broadcasters who pretend to fairness and balance and proclaim a monopoly on patriotism.
These are those who have assumed that what is good for themselves is absolutely good for the country.
In 1971 Mr. Kerry asked, "Who wants to be the last soldier to die for a lie?"
An equally important question to be asked is ...
"Who wants to be remembered as that part of an electorate persuaded to vote for candidates whose most powerful political efforts demonstrated an acute lack of moral and ethical integrity, on obsession with secrecy and little reverence for the truth?"
Cross-posted to Washblogand Pacific NW Portal