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Well I suppose it was inevitable that Dick Cheney would have to follow the leader and come out swinging. His speech, as reported here: DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2005?‚® is full of misdirection and typical Orwellian nonsense. It takes my breath away to read Cheney’s attempt to turn history on its head. It was the administration that mislead, lied and connived, and yet, according to Cheney, it is those who point that out who are apparently guilty of the lying. So this is what the leadership of the country has come to: a Soviet style attempt to whitewash a failing [or failed] regime change that they packaed and sold to a frightened nation as part of the eternal war on terrorism. It reeks of the very worst kind of Soviet era manipulation. Here we are in Iraq with an overstretched army whose morale is declining, whose strength is being sapped by the very people who wrap themselves in the flag and who recklessly sent the troops, under-prepared, under-equipped and under-manned into a country that represented no imminenet threat to the America. The gall of Cheney et al is awe inspiring. The nerve outrageous. The lies rampant. The ethics non-existent. The post-war corruption matched only by the pre-war miscalculation. The Bush regime is naked before us: what an ugly blot on our history they have become. Yet this Cheney speech is only the beginning: they will ratchet up the noise as much as they can. Let’s hope their opponents keep their nerve and that they can be as relentless in their pursuit of Cheney as he is in spewing out his lies.

Just to follow up on George Bush’s ratings, here is a summary from pollingreport.com:Bush: Job Ratings. Makes for ugly reading if you’re George!!

They keep on sinking. But instead of changing his ways he digs deeper into the hole. Now he comes out and tells us that it’s wrong to investigate the origins of the Iraq war. No it’s not. Not when we all now realize that we were systematically lied to by the very people who are supposed to protect us. Not after over 2,000 soldiers have died in a war that need not have taken place. And especially not if those who started the war are still pulling all the levers of power. George said in his latest speech [late last week] that he will take responsibility: well then he should come out and say he made a mistake and clear out the mischief mongers on his staff who planned the invasion of Iraq from as long ago as the mid-1990’s. Then he should face the veterans whose lives have been ruined by his ‘mistake’ and explain to them what he’s going to do to help them. George just doesn’t seem to understand that his plummeting popularity isn’t some dastardly Democratic Party plot, but is an indictment of his character: he’s a liar whose lies have cost lives. Lincoln’s saying about fooling people finally caught up with the Bush regime. Too bad there’s no way to get rid of him before 2008.

The Administration’s continuing efforts to justify torture are outrageous. There is no justification whatever that makes torture tolerable as an instrument of American policy. It is obscene to make exceptions. Either the country tolerates torture or it does not. It cannot be ‘sort of’ against. The Bush team, led by Dick Cheney, continues to try to draw distinctions between U.S. citizens, who they say should be safe from torture, and non-U.S. citizens inm foreign countries who may be subject to torture. This is a bogus distinction because some of those non-U.S. citizens are being held by the U.S. in foreign coiuntries exactly so they can be tortured. This is a ‘them and us’ type of argument that completely undermines any shred of respectability that the U.S. may have in the eyes of the world. It simply cannot be allowed. For America to reclaim some semblance of moral standing someone in Washington has to resist, and resist hard. Else there is no difference between the U.S. and any of the tyrants it purports to oppose. Stop it now!