Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The hopes of the civilized world ride with us


Cheney gave a speech Tuesday to a conference of the National Automobile Dealers Association (would you buy a used car from this vice president?), about half of which was about The War Against Terror (TWAT). He didn’t mention oil once. He did mention car bombs. Are car dealers for or against those? He also said that “the hopes of the civilized world ride with us,” which sounds like car-pooling, which they’re definitely against.


He brought up 9/11, naturally, saying the terrorists “did not know the people they killed. They didn’t know their names or what they did for a living. They just knew these unsuspecting people were Americans, and that was enough to kill them all.” Funny how people in the White House keep forgetting that not every 9/11 victim was actually an American.

It feels a little trite to point out just how often Cheney’s descriptions of the terrorists could be applied to himself, but sometimes trite is true. You probably noticed the thing about not knowing the names of the people they killed, when the military won’t give an estimate, to the nearest 10,000 say, of the numbers of Iraqis we’ve killed. Cheney also says the enemy “recognize neither the conventions of war, nor any rules of morality,” they “organize in secret” (undisclosed location, anyone?), and “seek to impose a dictatorship of fear”. He contrasts them with “civilized societies [which] uphold justice, mercy, and the value of life”. I recognize nothing of Dick Cheney in that description.

Or of car dealers, if it comes to that.

He says that “despite assassins and car-bombers Iraqis came out to vote at a rate of turnout higher than we have here in the United States.” If the Republicans have an unusual get-out-the-vote campaign in November, don’t say you weren’t warned.

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