First, Cheney and his pal Don “the Mon” Rumsfeld were booed at this week’s hot ticket event, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Their fair-weather conservative friends said so many mean, self-esteem endangering things, like “murdering scum” and “draft dodger.” Most of the name-calling seems to have been the work of Ron Paul supporters, so it can be written off–but still. It must sting.

If being bullied weren’t bad enough, the liberal media’s busily reminding everyone that today marks the fifth anniversary of that time when Cheney shot that guy in the face while quail hunting.

And lastly, later this month Cheney will “celebrate” the one-year anniversary of his most recent heart attack (that we know of). Come to think of it, you might send a nice flower arrangement or low-fat cookie bouquet to go with the card.

According to this data, there were 5,581 stories generated about Bill Clinton’s heart problems on Google News compared to only 1,964 stories for Dick Cheney’s fifth heart attack. Is this more evidence of liberal media bias? Maybe, or everyone just knows how the former vice president’s story is gonna end and so there’s no real cliffhangers there. Clinton also killed him in Twitter activity, but like the Conan-Leno thing, there’s a demographic explanation for that.

Remember yesterday when Dick Cheney basically called Obama a huge gaping vagina because he doesn’t go around constantly trying to strike the fear of God into people over terrorism like the Bush/Cheney folk did so well? Well, uncharacteristically, the Obama White House hit back. Hard.

Obama administration spokesman Dan Pfeiffer posted the following to the White House blog yesterday:

There has been a lot of discussion online and in the mainstream media about our response to various critics of the President, specifically former Vice President Cheney, who have been coming out of the woodwork since the incident on Christmas Day. I think we all agree that there should be honest debate about these issues, but it is telling that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the Administration than condemning the attackers. Unfortunately too many are engaged in the typical Washington game of pointing fingers and making political hay, instead of working together to find solutions to make our country safer.

First, it’s important that the substantive context be clear: for seven years after 9/11, while our national security was overwhelmingly focused on Iraq – a country that had no al Qaeda presence before our invasion – Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s leadership was able to set up camp in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they continued to plot attacks against the United States. Meanwhile, al Qaeda also regenerated in places like Yemen and Somalia, establishing new safe-havens that have grown over a period of years. It was President Obama who finally implemented a strategy of winding down the war in Iraq, and actually focusing our resources on the war against al Qaeda – more than doubling our troops in Afghanistan, and building partnerships to target al Qaeda’s safe-havens in Yemen and Somalia. And in less than one year, we have already seen many al Qaeda leaders taken out, our alliances strengthened, and the pressure on al Qaeda increased worldwide.

To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.

Second, the former Vice President makes the clearly untrue claim that the President – who is this nation’s Commander-in-Chief – needs to realize we are at War. I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama. In his inaugural, the President said “our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” In a recent speech, Assistant to the President for Terrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan said “Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy; these are the extremists we will defeat.” At West Point, the President told the nation why it was “in our vital national interest” to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to fight the war in Afghanistan, adding that as Commander in Chief, “I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.” And at Oslo, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, the President said, “We are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.”

There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.

Cheney just got served.

Image via

Well you just knew miserable old prick Dick Cheney would come creeping out of his cave any day now to blame Obama for America’s future destruction at the hands of al Qaeda cock-bombers, and he issued a statement today that does not disappoint.

Here is what Cheney told Politico:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.

So the Republicans are pissed that Obama waited three days to make a comment on cock-bomb-gate. Any guesses as to how long it was before either Bush or Cheney commented on Richard Reid’s attempted shoe bomb detonation aboard a plane in December of 2001? Six days. You can cut the irony with a knife with these assholes.

Also, why the hell is Dick Cheney so unhealthily fucking obsessed with war and whether or not Obama is saying the word “war” frequently enough to appeal to his blood-lusty fetishes?

Illustration by Zina Saunders

Yemen must be looking at Iraq with nation-remodeling envy or something because the country’s leaders are out there just begging the U.S. to invade their country, and, naturally, the Jesus party is frothing at the mouth to go in there and blow up some people of color who don’t read the bible on a regular basis, and it’s all Obama’s fault because he’s a lazy African or something.

Reports the BBC:

Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi told the BBC that Yemen had the will and ability to deal with al-Qaeda, but was undermined by a lack of support.

He estimated that several hundred al-Qaeda members were operating in Yemen and could be planning more attacks.

Meanwhile, asshole Republican blowhards are predictably blaming Obama for cock-bomb-gate.

“In the past six weeks, you’ve had the Fort Hood attack, the D.C. Five and now the attempted attack on the plane in Detroit … and they all underscored the clear philosophical difference between the administration and us,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

Yes, there were absolutely no terrorist attacks during the good ole Republican salad days of the Bush/Cheney administration. How soon we forget how totally awesome those pricks were. And obviously, the Obama administration is to blame for airport security failings that took place in Holland and Africa because if Obama weren’t so busy praying to Allah on the golf courses of Hawaii with Hitler’s ghost by his side at Christmas, then surely he could have personally saw to it that some Nigerian trust fund brat didn’t light his genitals ablaze in a plane over America’s most rottenest city. Obviously. Bomb Yemen. Let’s roll.

Cock-bomb-gate just gets better by the second…two of the “masterminds” behind the botched bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit were released from from the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay in November of 2007, under the regime of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Irony! |ABC News|

Last night CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a disturbing report on how the next big attack on America may come not via bombs or planes flying into buildings but via the internet, where skilled hackers can disrupt the nation’s energy grid, banking system, air traffic controls, etc. Steve Kroft reported that we are, more than any other country, vulnerable to such attacks because we’ve moved so much of our government and industry onto the internet. The whole piece was downright scary, but sort of buried inside of it was the revelation that in 2007 a group of hackers basically infiltrated all of the U.S. government’s computers and downloaded everything, financial records, military secrets, EVERYTHING, and the Bush administration, which loves to tout how they “kept the country safe” during their reign, kept it all under wraps to spare themselves the embarrassment. And perhaps worst of all, we still have no idea who did it.

Kroft spoke to Jim Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which advises Obama on issues relating to cyber-security:

“In 2007 we probably had our electronic Pearl Harbor. It was an espionage Pearl Harbor,” Lewis said. “Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don’t know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information.”

How much is a terabyte?

“The Library of Congress, which has millions of volumes, is about 12 terabytes. So, we probably lost the equivalent of a Library of Congress worth of government information in 2007,” Lewis explained.

“All stolen by foreign countries?” Kroft asked.

“Yeah. This was a serious attack. And that’s really what made people wake up and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get a grip on this,’” Lewis said.

So why has the public never learned of this? Because the Bush White House kept the lid on it, naturally:

“You know, I’ve been trying to figure out why that is. And some of it is the previous administration didn’t want to admit that they had been rolled in 2007. There’s a disincentive to tell people, ‘Hey, things are going badly.’ But it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. And some of us call it ‘the death of a thousand cuts.’ Every day a little bit more of our intellectual property, our innovative skills, our military technology is stolen by somebody. And it’s like little drops. Eventually we’ll drown. But every day we don’t notice,” Lewis said.

Here’s the whole chilling report…

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Waterboarding is still all the rage. You’ve got Dick Cheney pushing it on his torture-promoting circuit, right wing propagandists doing it for publicity, and in Lima, Peru there’s this frightening exhibit at the Museum of the Inquisition. The life-sized diorama depicts the brutal method “16th century style.” While this drowning-induced torture was used over 500 years ago, their defense of it was synonymous with the modern day positions held by Bush Cheney administration, with one wall text simply describing it as a way to: “cause pain without creating wounds or considerable bodily harm.” Yeah, unless you’re the one being tortured. Of course, back then, they also thought the Sun revolved around the Earth and practiced trial by drowning for so called witches. |C-Monster|