"Cheney Shows the Way"

The Reaganite Republican Resistance is political-column-style blog based on original commentary, but I really felt the need to re-post this piece from Pat Buchanan.  It's outstanding- and should be read by all conservatives.   I don't always agree with everything I hear from this pugnacious isolationist (particularly re. Israel)- this really needed to be said:

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Dick Cheney is giving the Republican Party a demonstration of how to fight a popular president. Stake out defensible high ground, do not surrender an inch, then go onto the attack.

The ground on which Cheney has chosen to stand is the most defensible the Republicans have: homeland security. In seven-and-a-half years after 9-11, not one terrorist attack struck our country.

And, unlike Obama's position, Cheney's is 100 percent reality based. He was there. He lived through this. He made the decisions to use the harsher techniques on the worst of the enemy who could yield the greatest intelligence to save American lives.

"The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do." And they "prevented the violent deaths of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people."

Having defended every decision he took, Cheney then counterattacked. He charged The New York Times with virtual treason in exposing the program to intercept calls from al-Qaida and mocked its Pulitzer Prize. He accused liberals and Speaker Pelosi of "feigned outrage" and "phony moralizing," asserting they were fully briefed on "the program and the methods." He charged Obama with endangering national security by "triangulating," adopting a policy designed less to secure America than to unite and appease his political coalition.

"There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance."

Cheney comes to this quarrel armed with credibility, certitude, consistency and conviction born of eight years of success. Listening to Obama's disquisition, one gets the sense his homeland security policy is the collective view of the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review, with a sign-off by the local chapter of the ACLU.

That Cheney is winning seems undeniable.

Not only has his approval rating risen to 37 percent, probably higher on national security, Obama's coalition is cracking apart.

Speaker Pelosi's credibility has been shredded over what she knew and when she knew it regarding waterboarding. Her comrades are all howling that the CIA lied, but no one wants an investigation.

The left wing of the party believes Obama double-crossed them when he refused to release the photos of abused prisoners, kept the military tribunals and sent 22,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

And Harry Reid and a Democratic Senate voted 90 to 6 to humiliate Obama by denying him the funds needed to close Guantanamo until he comes up with a plan to hold the 240 hard-core inmates somewhere other than in the United States.

Again, Cheney is winning because he has been there and his position is reality-based. For, while the use of harsh interrogation techniques is a legal question, it also presents a moral dilemma. A moral case can be made that, given the murderers we confronted, the prospect of more U.S. dead, the non-lethality of the techniques and the value of the intelligence acquired, it was the right thing to do. And the Democrats are losing because, with few exceptions, they have been neither consistent nor honest. Their key leaders were read in on the interrogation techniques. 


Few protested. They went along when America seemed in imminent peril. Recall: Democratic Sens. Dodd, Daschle, Edwards, Kerry, Reid and Clinton all voted to authorize war in Iraq. But, by the time the primaries of 2008 came around, they had all moved -- some 180 degrees -- to get right with the Democratic base. And this is Obama's problem. He ran to the left of Hillary and pledged to close Guantanamo, as the prison camp had come to be twinned, though unfairly, in the liberal mind and Muslim world with the sadistic abuses at Abu Ghraib. 


Obama never thought through what he would do with the hard-core al-Qaida housed in Guantanamo. This is a recurring problem of liberals. They are forever into posturing, assuming heroic moral stands, but rarely consider the consequences in the real world. It was brave to denounce the Shah, Anastasio Somoza and Ian Smith. But when they fell, we got the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Sandinistas and "Comrade Bob" Mugabe in Zimbabwe. In his speeches, Obama is all abstractions. While listeners may say he speaks beautifully, 24 hours later, who remembers what he said? 


Cheney deals with the concrete. We remember that scene in the White House bunker, with that plane headed for the Capitol, and we remember Khalid Sheikh Mohammad saying he will talk after he gets to New York and sees his lawyer. 


The Republican Party needs to get off the psychiatrist's couch, and stand up and fight for what it believes. You don't need a moderate with a pretty face to deliver a moderate message. 


The former vice president with the crocodile grin has just shown the way.

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So, enough Republican naval-gazing already... let the battle begin.  We know who we are, and what we stand for... regardless of attempts on the left to divide and create dissarray in the GOP.

  

Bedrock Reaganite principles of strong defense and minimized government will provide the ideal antidote for voters looking for a way out of Obama-Land in 2010-2012... all we have to do is resist the most outrageous of Obama's proposals, stand up for our beliefs, and most importantly not provide him any political cover for the consequences of his spending and limp defense posture... time is on our side.  

As Bobby Jindal has said regarding Republican setbacks at the polls in 2006 and 2008:

"People need to look at the history of Ronald Reagan when he lost his first attempt at the Presidency (in 1976). He didn’t go back and say, ‘Let’s water down the conservatism. Let’s dilute what we’re saying. He made it even stronger.... he made it EVEN sharper. There’s a lesson there for potential candidates" 

"We need to be principled in our conservatism. We need to be unabashed, unafraid. We won’t always be popular with editorial writers and a lot of the members of the national media... and that’s OK. At the end of the day, it’s more important that we stick to our principles."

It's time to call a lie a lie, a fraud a fraud, and Obama's catastrophic errors for just what they are- and bring the battle to the DNC, MSM, and Team Obama-  NOW.

Yes-We-Can (Get Laughed-At by an Eccentric Tin Pot Dictator)

Doesn't look like many countries take Obama and Hillary very seriously, does it?  And the reason it appears that way is because they don't. Time to break-out another goofy "restart" button, perhaps? 

(good luck spelling it right in Korean this time).

Dear Leader Comrade Generalissimo Kim Jong Il 

(I hear he's  one-hell-of-a-golfer ) somehow doesn't seem to have fallen under the charms of Obama's hollow schmoozing one bit.   Rather, sensing weakness, the communist North Korean regime responded to the conciliatory gestures with nothing but contempt and aggression.  The flurry of nuclear testing and missile launches timed for our Memorial Day weekend was yet the latest "diplomatic statement" from the pugnacious, Stalinist 

Hermit Kingdom.

Of course, it never really made a lot of sense to try and deal in good faith and "reach out" to a dark, evil, and Machiavellian regime that would "hate" Mickey Mouse if he was US president- and for a refresher, has shot-down civilian airliners, operates a cruel police-state with a chain of torture/concentration camps... and even had plans to assassinate Reagan on his visit to Korea's DMZ in 1983.  

So it's hard to imagine that a grown-man like Obama truly believed that Pyongyang was reasonable, trustable... and cuddle-able.  The difference with this president is that they will not only hate him, but will despise and disrespect him deeply for his cowardice, naivete, and lack of resolution.  Of course,  a man with all the diplomatic experience and strategic/moral clarity that Obama and Hillary lack -like say, a John Bolton- could have told you this is exactly how it would play out with Obama's appeasement-based posture... as he did. 

Sadly, all Team Obama are really considering is the same kind of "deal" that serial-failure Jimmy Carter talked Bill Clinton into ten years ago: bribing Pyongyang with fuels and food to stop their development of nuclear weapons and ICBMs, while they graciously accept our gifts and continue to do just as they please at secret, underground sites... and serruptitiously selling nuclear know-how to our other enemies like Syria and Iran.

Pyongyang is currently developing -and has now tested- it's longest range ICBM, one specifically designed to carry a nuclear warhead. The Taepodong-2 missile has a 6000 km range, bringing Alaska and even possibly the west coast of the US within range... and right as the misguided Obama seeks the cancellation of many of America's defense programs.

Although many still in the ether don't realize it yet, Obama is in a tailspin on the economy, ethics, and foreign policy.  Nobody that has any sense of how the world works respects (nor fears) him... and that includes Wall St., the military, the Kremlin, Tehran, Caracas, or Pyongyang.  

Somehow all the talk of how Kim is this crackpot eccentric while Obama is portrayed as all-knowing and wise doesn't quite square with reality when the "crackpot" is running circles around our flawless messiah.  This is the same oblivious President Obama that was apparently busy with his puppy-vetting process or playing basketball while the Russians where nabbing our Afghan supply air-base in Kyrgizstan 

In addition to his ethical and fiscal follies, Barack Obama is endangering our national security, a failure of his most primary duty as president... maybe we should draw a line here? 

The luxury of living in a celebrity-driven/liberal/MSM fantasy world is not a right that Obama supporters can cling-to indefinitely, as it's both the voters and the press' duty to make informed, responsible, good-faith decisions... not waste power making a self-indulgent PC fashion statement instead.  And it's getting to the point where this kind of willfully-ignorant "thinking" is not just irresponsible, but dangerous.  Obamania's sheeple are deeply delusional, and in desperate need of deprogramming... as the misguided Obama's enablers, these fools are going to get us killed.

Ruthless, insatiable foes clearly have no reason to take seriously a smiley plastic mannequin like Obama, they know he's not going to do anything.  He was hoping to half-surrender to everyone on his recent international glad-handing tours and have Gates handle Iraq and Afghanistan- in order to buy us some peace and tranquility for him to focus on his real pet project, a radical, far-left domestic agenda... but events tend to have a way of intervening-

I would say that we should now expect for Tehran to deal Obama even greater defeats... except for the fact that tiny Israel will likely be saving us from our folly.   Obama, like Jimmy Carter, is making the US into an impotent, irrelevant bystander as events take their course, and nations like Russia and China fill the leadership vacuum.  Allies such as Israel will be plotting a more independent course in the interest of self-preservation... and will -like our enemies- simply ignore Obama.

The White House is likely working diligently on how to offer-up a speech or statement full of empty platitudes and ludicrous apologies (as in Prague)... do nothing about Pyongyang's defiance... and then blame it all on someone else.  But the problem with this standard Obama default strategy is that Democrats Bill Clinton and ex-President Carter are the ones who created this mess ten years ago... and our new president has adopted the identical, failed policy lock-stock-and-barrel.  

If you're American or one of our allies, and not scared with Barack Obama as US Commander-in-Chief yet...  you sure ought to be.