Cheney: Obama endangers the nation

from The Washington Times
By Sean Lengell
Sunday, May 10, 2009

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday continued his verbal attack against President Obama, saying that the country is more vulnerable to a potential terrorist attack since the Obama administration took power.

Mr. Cheney said that administration's dismantling of many of the policies and protections instituted by President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — including the planned closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba and halting controversial prisoner interrogation techniques — have made the country more vulnerable to future attacks.

"That's my belief," Mr. Cheney said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "I think to the extent that those [Bush-era] policies were responsible for saving lives, that the administration is now trying to cancel those policies … means in the future we're not going to have the same safeguards we've had for the last eight years."

The former vice president defended controversial interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, saying that it had been an effective tool in extracting useful information from suspected terrorists such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of helping carry out the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks Washington and New York.

"He did not cooperate fully in terms of interrogations until after waterboarding," Mr. Cheney said. "Once we went through that process, he produced vast quantities of invaluable information about al Qaida."

Mr. Obama in January banned the practice on prisoners by U.S. interrogators.

Mr. Cheney said he believes it's his duty to speak out against the Obama administration "because I think the issues that are at stake here are so important."

Mr. Cheney also took a shot at former Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell, saying that the conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh is a more loyal Republican than the former Army commander.

"If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh," Mr. Cheney said.
Mr. Powell recently said that Republicans need to more move to the center politically and that Mr. Limbaugh's polarizing far-right rhetoric hurts the party's image.

Mr. Limbaugh retaliated by accusing Mr. Powell of being "just another liberal" and that he should become a Democrat.

"I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party," Mr. Cheney said. "I didn't know he was still a Republican."
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Is conservatism over? Well, of course it is!

Climb
Conservatives must have the courage to defend their convictions.

from The National Review
By Mark Steyn

Is conservatism over?

Well, of course it is. Everyone from James Carville to Colin Powell says so. “The Republican party is in deep trouble,” General Powell told some group willing to pay him serious money to deliver this kind of incisive insight. “Americans do want to pay taxes for services. Americans want more government in their lives, not less.”

Whether or not they want it, they’re certainly going to get it. And if you like big government now, just think how big it’ll be once both parties are fully signed up to the concept. You’ll recall that General Powell voted for Barack Obama, coming out and publicly stiffing his “beloved friend” John McCain, after years of more discreetly stiffing (in leaks to Bob Woodward and others) his not-so-beloved colleagues in the Bush administration. But, in fairness to the former secretary of state, his breezy endorsement of more government and more taxes is as near as we’ve ever got to a coherent political philosophy from him. If the GOP refuses to take his advice, I would urge him to run a third-party campaign on this refreshingly candid platform.

One of Powell’s more famous utterances was his rationale, after the 1991 Gulf War, for declining to involve the U.S. military in the Balkans: “We do deserts, we don’t do mountains.” Actually, by that stage, the U.S. barely did deserts. The first President Bush’s decision, at Powell’s urging, not to topple Saddam but to halt the coalition forces at the gates of Baghdad sent the world a message about American purpose whose consequences we live with to this day. As for the Kurds and Shiites to whom it never occurred that the world’s superpower would assemble a mighty coalition for the purpose of fighting half a war to an inconclusive conclusion, Saddam quickly took a bloody revenge: That’s an interesting glimpse of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Colin Powell’s much-vaunted “moderation.”

So I have no great regard for Powell’s strategic thinking, at home or abroad. As the general sees it, the Republican party ought to be a “big tent”: Right now, the tent is empty, with only a few “mean spirited” and “divisive” talk-radio hosts chewing the limbs off live kittens while gibbering to themselves. By comparison, over in the Democrat tent, they’ve got blacks, gays, unions, professors, Ben Affleck: diversity on parade.

In fact, the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’ insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless, half-hearted, semi-colonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: In the Democrats’ parade, whatever your bugbear, government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

And yet and yet . . . Last November, even with the GOP’s fiscal profligacy, even with the financial sector’s “October surprise,” even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even facing the natural cycle of a two-party system, the washed-up loser no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.

Okay, it’s not 51 percent. But still: Obama’s 53 percent isn’t a big transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it were.

To put it in Powellite terms, the general thinks the Republican party is in the desert, when in fact it’s climbing a mountain. All things considered, the resilience of American conservatism is one of the most remarkable features of contemporary Western politics. It’s up against significant members of its own party. It’s up against media for whom the Democrats’ positions are the default positions on almost anything that matters.
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