When you compare 1994 Dick Cheney to present day Cheney, the contrast is startling.
Where he once actually calculated the consequences in waging a war that would require an occupation, the Dick Cheney of today is a shameless war criminal and profiteer with so much blood on his hands, he can't travel abroad for fear of arrest for war crimes. 9/11 changed that old rationality and ultimately, Cheney and his Halliburton friends profited immeasurably from Operation Iraqi Freedom. The prospect of future conflicts brings new dollar signs for Dick Cheney.Fox's Howie Kurtz assembled a panel of folks who think the president is unforgivable for not labeling future operations to curtail ISIL a WAR. Juan Williams was the lone voice of sanity, while Stephen Hayes and Lauren Ashburn were piling on the neo-con war-mongering.
Ashburn who came to Fox about a year ago said she was very excited about the opportunity to work with all of the great journalists at Fox News and Fox Business. She compared the media coverage of the run up to the Iraq war in 2003 to this ISIL situation. Back then, media essentially gave the Bush Administration carte blanche to bomb the hell out of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Ashburn defends the press which "saluted" the Bush Administration by pushing the idea that Saddam had WMDs, but she conveniently left off the part where we learned that they made all that stuff up.
Stephen Hayes, author of CHENEY The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President, believes the President's initial labeling of ISIL as a "JV" team was unforgivable. Juan Williams mentioned the president's remarks where he said, 'we don't have a strategy to deal with ISIL,' was taken out of context. The president did say we don't have a strategy to deal with ISIL in Syria because of the complexity of the situation. After the atrocities committed by the Syrian Dictator Assad, the president doesn't want to go in guns a blazing and inadvertently help his regime. Williams agrees the president needs to continue along his current path of escalating the conflict and increasing the strikes on ISIL, but the other guests and Kurtz don't care much for the president's language. They want the president to say W-A-R and NOTHING else will do.
Three out of four of these Fox pundits believe President Obama is an ignominious fool because he doesn't succumb to the seduction of the media and "liberals" like Dana Milbank, who labels the president's speeches as "happy talk" and Ron Fournier who doesn't like his president to appear "weakish." No one seems to care if President Obama may be considering the lives of soldiers and their families as Dick Cheney once did in the 90's. They want an all out assault on ISIL along with Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda, regardless of the devastating costs in blood and treasure.
Barack Obama clearly remembers 2003, when the media tragically rubber-stamped any military campaign. Perhaps he's not going to show his hand (which might alert our enemies) and try to devise an effective counter-terrorism strategy. Ironically, the takeaway from this segment is exactly the opposite of its intent, which is quite common at Fox News. Kurtz and friends showed that President Obama is actually doing the right thing by not quenching the media's thirst for war as they have a very rich history of being WRONG.
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