It usually takes an intelligent person and eloquent speaker to convince the public of his or her lies. Cheney is certainly one of these. It does make him a "great" politician for the neocons, but in my opinion, the truly great politicians are the ones who actually represent the majority of the people and not their own interest groups (as this is the basic idea of democracy, no?), and don't lie to the people they are supposed to represent. So I guess I do need help, because although he might be sharp, I think classifying him as great is going a little far.
I didn't see the program, but wonder if he recounted any of his past words:
8/14/1992: "The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we were not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
6/23/1998: Halliburton CEO Cheney says, "The good Lord didn?t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is."
Year 2000 campaign as VP candidate: Cheney says the US stopped short of toppling Saddam in 1991 as to avoid being "an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments."
2001: Cheney repeatedly invokes Atta's meeting with senior Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague as evidence between al Qaeda and Iraq, despite FBI evidence that Atta was in Virginia and Florida at the time. One example on
12/9/2001: Cheney on Meet the Press claims it has "been pretty well confirmed that [Mohammed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."
[and by the way Dick, Czechoslovakia dissolved in 1993...so OBVIOUSLY he wasn't there]
9/16/2001: MR. RUSSERT [Meet the Press]: Do we have and evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to [9/11]?
VP CHENEY: No.
Late November, 2001: In a meeting with C. Rice and G. Tenet, Cheney says: "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."
3/24/2002: On CNN?s Late Edition, Cheney says of Saddam: "This is a man of great evil, as the president said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."
8/26/2002: Nashville, TN "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors - including Saddam's own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam's direction." The NY Times reported that "The one specific source [Cheney] did cite was Hussein Kamel al-Majid, a son-in-law of Mr. Hussein's who defected in 1994 after running Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. But Mr. Majid told American intelligence officials in 1995 that Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled. What's more, Mr. Majid could not have had any insight into Mr. Hussein's current nuclear activities: he was assassinated in 1996 on his return to Iraq."
9/8/2002: "We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to build a nuclear weapon."
9/12/2002: "We will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions."
9/14/2002: to Rush Limbaugh: "What's happening, of course, is we're getting additional information that, in fact, [Saddam] is reconstituting his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs and that's what really precipitates the concern now."
9/20/2002: "We now have irrefutable evidence that [Saddam] has once again set up and reconstituted his program to take uranium, to enrich it to sufficiently high grade, so that it will function as the base material as a nuclear weapon. And there's no doubt about the fact that the level of effort has escalated in recent months."
3/16/2003: "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." On doubts of nuclear programs: "I think Mr. El Baradei frankly is wrong, and I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing."
"And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Six months later after the beginning of the war, Cheney admits he
misspoke.
Flip-flopper, liar, but he is master of using words for deception, I'll give him that much credit.
