Stomach

Stupid death of the week: Jennifer Strange participated in a Sacramento radio station’s “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest in which whoever drank the most water without having to pee won. A few hours later she died of water intoxication.

Dick Cheney was interviewed by Chris Wallace this morning.

On Iraq: “Chris, we have, in fact, made enormous progress.”

On the New Way Forward (TM): “Why don’t we get together in a couple of months and see how it worked.” Yes, let’s do that.

On Congress’s complete inability to halt the New Way Forward (TM):

CHENEY: So Congress clearly has a role to play.

Q: That’s a consultative role.

CHENEY: It is a consultative role. ... you cannot run a war by committee.

(Pardon my not blockquoting, by the way, there’s a bug in New Blogger that screws up line spacing after a blockquote.)

On Democrats in Congress: “But then they end up critical of what we’re trying to do, advocating withdrawal or so-called redeployment of force, but they have absolutely nothing to offer in its place. I have yet to hear a coherent policy out of the Democratic side with respect to an alternative to what the President has proposed in terms of going forward. They basically, if we were to follow their guidance, the comments, for example, that a lot of them made during the last campaign about withdrawing U.S. forces, we simply go back and re-validate the strategy that Osama bin Laden has been following from day one, that if you kill enough Americans, you can force them to quit, that we don’t have the stomach for the fight.”

So-called redeployment. And clearly, the way to invalidate Osama bin Laden’s strategy is to let them kill many, many more Americans. That’ll show ‘em we have the stomach.

On Chuck Hagel: “And for us to do what Chuck Hagel, for example, suggests or to buy into that kind of analysis -- it’s really not analysis, it’s just criticism -- strikes me as absolutely the wrong thing to do.”

Just criticism. Notice that now “criticism” is a pejorative term.


Polls, elections, he’ll ignore them equally:

Q: By taking the policy you have, haven’t you, Mr. Vice President, ignored the expressed will of the American people in the November election?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, Chris, this President, and I don’t think any President worth his salt can afford to make decisions of this magnitude according to the polls. The polls change.

Q: This was an election, sir.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Polls change day by day, week by week. ... you cannot simply stick your finger into the wind and say, gee, public opinion is against, we better quit. That is part and parcel of the underlying fundamental strategy that our adversaries believe afflicts the United States.


The key word in the sentence “This President does not make policy based on public opinion polls” is “polls,” because it’s a red herring, a distraction from what he’s really saying. Let’s try the sentence again without it, and see if anything is clarified: “This President does not make policy based on public opinion.”

Bush will be on 60 Minutes tonight. A preview: “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude and I believe most Iraqis express that.”