You’ve almost got to admire this latest administration pushback, in some perverse way. The idea that it is the critics of the war who are the real revisionists is breathtaking in its shamelessness.
“The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight, but any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false,” Mr. Cheney said.
So now they’re denying that prewar intel was even “hyped”? Now that’s chuzpah.
And then there’s this:
“The terrorists believe that by controlling an entire country,” he said, “they will be able to target and overthrow other governments in the region, and to establish a radical Islamic empire that encompasses a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way to Indonesia. They have made clear, as well, their ultimate ambitions: to arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate all Western countries and to cause mass death in the United States.”
Not-Vietnam now has its own Not-Domino Theory.
And apparently the attempt to portray Murtha as an acolyte of Michael Moore wasn’t polling well:
In remarks delivered at the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Cheney briefly said he considered debate over the war healthy, and he echoed President Bush’s recent praise of Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has called for an early withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, as “a good man, a marine, a patriot.”
I saw Dana Rohrabacher on the increasingly-isolated-from-reality Fox News yesterday, and to hear him talk, you’d think that all the commotion in Congress last Friday came from Representatives trying to outshout one another in their praise for Murtha’s patriotism. It really is amazing how quickly the new party line can be adopted. Chocolate rations are up!