080601pdbIt has come to my attention that the former CEO of Halliburton is saying stupid-assed crap yet again. This would not normally be news, but since from January 2001 to January 2009 he was the de facto leader of the most powerful nation on earth, a credulous corporate media treats his every utterance as the Word of God.

The latest stupidity from Mr. Cheney was apparently occasioned by the failed attempt of a hapless would-be terrorist to pull off a Richard Reid and detonate explosives in mid-air. Just as Mr. Reid was easily foiled and life went on as usual, the latest hapless fellow was easily foiled and life goes on as usual. However, that didn’t stop Mr. Cheney from making the following gnomic pronouncement:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted sky bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term “war on terror” and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe,” Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. “Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society.”

So Dick, since you’re speaking of not taking terrorism seriously:

Did you read the PDBs that the CIA was frantically lobbing at your administration during the spring and summer of 2001?

We know Bush, your nominal boss, didn’t. (In fact, he was so intent on not paying attention to the CIA’s warnings that they actually dared to interrupt his holy entire-month-of-August vacation at his Potemkin ranch in Crawford to read him the August 6, 2001 brief — the one whose first page is shown up above. His sole response was: “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”)

We know Condi Rice, whose job as National Security chief it was to care about such things, and who was warned about them in March of 2001, didn’t.

We know Karl, who controlled the Bush-puppet’s strings when you weren’t pulling them yourself, didn’t.

Did you?

And if you didn’t– why not?

And if you did, why didn’t you do anything? Sandy Berger and Richard Clarke told you all (especially Condi) back in January of 2001 to look out for these guys– why were you pretending we weren’t at war? Instead, after Mr. Berger went public with this fact, you tried to prosecute him for making and then properly disposing of copies of information he’d himself generated during his time as National Security chief, prior to testifying before the 9/11 Commission.

If you had — if ANYONE in your administration had — paid any sort of attention to what the intelligence community was screaming at you, we might not have seen three planes hijacked and used as bombs on a certain September day in 2001.

Know what’s worse? Even after that, you and your fellow PNAC buddies still had no use for the CIA’s vetted intelligence. Instead, you and your soulmate Donald “Darth” Rumsfeld had fellow PNACers Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz running your “Office of Special Plans“, which was tasked with finding reasons to invade and occupy Iraq, and ignoring anything that didn’t fit the PNAC party line that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein a) directed the 9/11 attacks and/or b) had oooodles of workable “weapons of mass destruction” that he’d somehow managed to hide from UN inspectors who’d done everything but give the man a colonoscopy looking for the stuff. (Doug Feith, by the way, earned the epithet “the f—ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth” from none other than General Tommy Franks, who had to put up with taking orders from a civilian with no intelligence training, experience or ability, but who loved to ignore the Geneva Conventions.)

Oh, and speaking of Richard Reid: Attaturk reminds everyone that the same Republicans currently wetting themselves in public over a guy who was easily subdued before he could harm anything other than his own crotch somehow failed to be so excited — or so critical of the White House — over a very similar incident that occurred when the guy occupying the Oval Office was a Republican. Hypocrisy much, Messrs. Hoekstra, King and Cheney?

Chris Bowers is right: If by some miracle Sandra Day O’Connor had decided to allow the Florida recount to proceed and Al Gore to become president, the Republicans would have tried to impeach him just like they did Clinton, had 9/11 happened on his watch. Then again, as I have stated before, since President Gore would have a) kept Clinton’s national-security team in place and b) actually read and heeded the CIA’s briefings, 9/11 could have been averted, much as Sandy Berger averted the Millenium Plot. The nation wouldn’t have suffered a ruinous, unjust, and expensively prolonged decade of wars, the Bush billionaires’ deficit-growing tax cuts would never have happened, several hundred thousand Iraqis and several thousand Americans, Brits and Aussies would still be alive, and we’d all be a lot better off than we are now.

Arrrrrrgh.