NEWS: Cheney: Vote GOP or Be Terrorized

POLITICS: Cheney: Vote GOP or Be Terrorized (Updated)

Dick Cheney is selling poison in Iowa.

As if we don't face the threat of another attack now. Who knew we were so safe? Not me.

I don't need to tell Dick Cheney that terrorists want to hit us again no matter who sits in the White House. But I would tell Dick Cheney, if I were his advisor, that this line of argument is crude, obnoxious, and has serious backfire potential built into it. He is implicitly saying no terrorist attacks can get through if he and George W. hold the White House.

We all know this is b.s. and I shouldn't even have to point it out. It is not possible to deflect every potential attack. We could turn the United States into a totalitarian fortress and attacks would still get through.

If Dick Cheney is prepared to lay the blame of a future terrorist attack on both a Kerry Administration and even the voters (!) then his administration needs to accept the blame for terrorist attacks that occur on its watch. And that includes the attack on September 11.

I do not blame the Bush Administration for the attack on September 11. Nor do I blame the Clinton Administration. Nor will I blame a possible future Kerry Administration if it comes into being. Nor should anybody.

In The Art of War Sun Tzu famously told how to defeat an enemy's leadership: "When he is united, divide him." On that note I'd like to revisit an essay Lee Harris wrote for Tech Central Station on the second anniversary of September 11, 2001. He concludes:

UPDATE: It looks like Cheney's quote was snipped in the middle of a sentence. The AP reporter used a period instead of ellipses to hide that fact. Here is Cheney's complete sentence:

That is a lot less inflammatory. I still think Cheney is wrong here, but less obnoxiously so.

John Kerry has said he will respond to any attack on the United States, and I believe him. Why wouldn't he? He is not a peacenik.

As a side note, what worries me personally about a Kerry presidency isn't that he won't fight back but that he doesn't have any strategy that isn't reactive. We could fight terrorism tit-for-tat forever. Bush's strategy is proactive with an eye on root causes, while Kerry's isn't.

Dear Mr. Dick Cheney,

You suck and I hate you.

Sincerely,

crucifiedalien

Last I heard the terrorists share my viewpoint: Anyone but Bush.

I wouldn't put it past these assholes to set Kerry up if he wins so it looks like the American Public made a fatal mistake in electing him. I mean, honestly, do we really believe that if they lose Bush and Cheney are going to leave the White House gracefully?

Makes me sick to think about.

GO KERRY GOOOOOOOO!

The sad thing is, there are people who believe this propaganda bullshit. I give you Exibit A. The terrorist threat warning system. This administration has spent four years twisting what has been said and done to suit their purposes. Stalin would be proud.

The final quote used in this message focuses on removing the blame for the attacks of 9/11/01 on any group or individual...yet the attacks took place. SOMEONE is responsible.
is it only the 9-or-whatever terrorists involved? or is osama bin laden also responsible? or is the al qaeda network as a whole responsible? is globalism? is internationalism?
most will just respond "yes" to some of these questions and "no" to others, depending on political leanings, but the fact remains, it is obvious that it is more complex than just the actual hijackers of september 11.
its time to cut the bullshit and acknowledge this fact without exploiting it for political purposes.
im voting for kerry, i think bush is a fucker of the worst variety, but i think the roots of our current cultural situation, as dictated by the events of 9/11/2001, stretch back long before the moment the actual attacks took place. so what?
lets figure out what went wrong and fix it.
goddammit.

Lincoln?

you need to change the laws, to allow someone to run more then two terms. then you can bring clinton back, for i would feel safer knowing he was in charge again. i'm really not sure about kerry, but he isn't bush, which is a deciding factor as far as i'm concerned. your electronic voting stations, should have a large battery hooked up to the republican button, so that we can train the people of the us to not vote for people with iq's lower then 80

Technically, there were only 34 states when Lincon was inaugurated. It would have to be an attack after 1912 when Arizona was made the 48th state... My guess is that he's talking about the British Invasion of the 1960's. What this means is Lyndon B Johnson is the one to be held accountable.

Actually, if I were a terrorist I'd want bush to STAY in office. He's the greatest recruiting tool OBL ever could hope for....

How horrible for us liberals to accuse the republicans of using fear to intimidate America into voting for an incompetent who has such a myopic view of the world I wanna slap him in the face.

the guys name is dick

says it all.

Dick Cheney and the rest of those neocons are a bunch of evil manipulative mindfuckers. Not only that Dick Cheney looks like a smarmy science teacher I once had in high school.

LICK BUSH AND HIS DICK IN '04!

That is what President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been pretending to do! And that is what VP Cheney is saying here. Anyone who can read this as a "threat" or "voter intimidation" is just making excuses at this point.

What he isn't saying is that he and Bush have responded largely with color coded panic and suggestions to buy duct tape. They didn't prevent Spain from getting hit. They didn't prevent Russia from getting attacked. Whoever these terrorists are, the last three years have been totally ineffective at eliminating them. Maybe if the energy had been on fighting terrorism instead of invading Iraq, the terrorists would actually have been hunted down and neutralized.

If you really want to be safe after Nov. 2, you'd do well to vote for Michael Badnarik-- his self-defense suggestions go a bit further than duct tape. Voting for the Kerry/Bush ticket is a vote for the Invasion of Iraq, more ineffective strategies against terrorism, eroding liberty here at home, and the whole host of policy decisions that got us into this mess. The terrorists have been after us for years. It's not like they just popped out of the woodwork because Bush got elected. So Cheney is right-- John Kerry probably won't make you safer. But Cheney is also wrong. So wrong.

I agree. Trying to topple terrorism by waging wars is silly. Anybody is a potential terrorist, given the right social/economic conditions. Trying to solve the problem by getting rid of a few people in charge is perhaps helpful, but in the long run, I fear it's about as effective as putting a Band-Aid on a melanoma.

[Edited on Sep 08, 2004 7:19AM]

fuck it.
lets let everyone use biological warfare and weapons of mass destruction, and lets wipe mankind, or at least the majority of it off the planet, then the animals can live in peace and well all be dead so noone will have anything to worry about, but in the mean time lets just try to have fun.

you know, if the liberal/democratic party had something to stand on besides the anger they feel towards themselves for selling out in the seventies which they are more than obviously redirecting towards anyone but themselves, i'd give them a vote.

but this anger and "anyone but bush" is such an illogical fallacy...take another four years and rest, kid. get yr party and yr heads together. ask yourselves for forgiveness at screwing up in the sixties and seventies, stop messing with yr children's heads and come back with a democratic party we can have faith in again.

yr anger will only consume yrself and take the rest of us with you.

Not to mention just a few short months ago Dick was saying that another Terrorist attack was almost certain to happen regardless.

Now he's using that idea for voter intimidation?

How fucking transparent can you get?

wow,
theyre really winning the hearts and minds there

I'd like to SELL a vowel, Pat.

It's even less effective to get rid of people who were not in charge, as our President is so fond of doing.

Um.... I wasn't born til '73. I feel absolutely no guilt about anything that occured politically before I could vote. The current administration are hate mongers and seem to have an IQ that hovers somewhere around 80.... and they use Religion as their guidance for government policy. FRIGHTENING. I am not a huge fan of Kerry, but I do feel like he is my only potential option for protecting myself from the nightmare of four more years of the current insanity. I'm pretty sure that's a common sentiment among a lot of people in this country, and I don't think that has ANYTHING to do with anything you just said. Plain and simple... Kerry is a better option in my opinion than Bush. And as we all know, U.S. elections seem to be more and more about the lesser of two evils these days.

Oh, and

I think that definition fits quite well with Cheney's speech. Elect us, or else... hmmmm.

[Edited on Sep 08, 2004 8:29AM]

These guys have a psychological playbook that tries desperately to sell the American public short. Fearmongering may work on the braindead, but I have a bit more faith in the human race.

The neocons are counting on the ignorant to vote their fears, and the intelligent ones to sit this one out.

Send them all back to the miserable dark hole they crawled out of.

Somehow, I don't think that the fact that Cheney said this on the same day the American death toll in the Iraq war passed 1,000 is a mere coincidence.