Last night on The O'Reilly Factor, they played the video ad cooked up by Liz Cheney's "Keep America Safe" outfit attacking President Obama for his supposedly slipshod handling of the Underwear Bomber and his slow response while on vacation.
O'Reilly thought the ad was just cracker jack, calling it "devastating." Yeah, devastatingly hypocritical.
Jane Skinner was there to provide some kind of pushback, I guess, and she managed to at least point out that maybe turning the national response to terrorism into a partisan political is not really in the public's best interest. Of course, some of us pointed that out eight years ago, too, but no one listened then, either.
But utterly unmentioned was the fact that, when faced with identical circumstances in 2001, the Bush administration waited six days before responding publicly. Indeed, ignoring this fact is part of the new double standard when talking terrorism: Whatever Bush-Cheney did was right, whatever Obama does is wrong.
This is part of the steady drumbeat of fearmongering we've been getting from the Cheney crowd since the election, and the media -- outside of Rachel Maddow and the left blogosphere -- is letting them get away with it.
More importantly, they are obliterating from public view the fact that Bush’s post-9/11 anti-terrorism policies in toto made us less safe, because they intensified the conditions that lead to terrorist recruitment. This was enunciated clearly by the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate, which "found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks."
Some prime recent examples include the recent attack on the CIA base in Afghanistan, in which the perpetrator's wife claimed he had been radicalized by the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Finally, there’s Cheney’s unmentioned (on Fox, at least) role in the release of the two men who founded Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.
It’s almost as if Bush-Cheney intentionally sabotaged the incoming administration by ensuring future terrorist attacks. Indeed, that question has been raised.
Even more disgusting is that these same connivers are trying to lay the blame for the evil fruits of their malfeasance on the back of the man elected to clean up their mess.
