Demagogue

One of my favorite blogs, The Carpetbagger Report, has written a good post this morning on Vice President Cheney's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Monday. Carpetbagger notes that "the VP is once again subtly connecting the war in Iraq and 9/11."

During his speech, Cheney felt the need to make this bizarre point:

"We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway."

Okay, so he wants us all to know that the Muslim terrorists already hated us before we decided to invade and occupy Iraq. And why is that is relevant? Do ill-advised foreign policy decisions make sense just because they come after — and not before — we are hit by a terrorist strike?

And it may not have occurred to Cheney that his strange, chronological argument doesn't work very well for our British allies.

Unless Tony Blair were willing to lie as unabashedly as the Bushies, the British prime minister couldn't say: "We were not in Iraq on July 7th, 2005, and the terrorists hit us anyway."