Addressing West Point academy’s graduates,

Cheney relied on the same brand of doomsday rhetoric

that has characterized his remarks since 9/11

“We know that Al Qaeda is working feverishly

to obtain even more destructive weapons"

At one point he cited the link between

Iraq and Al Qaeda (which has been thoroughly debunked)

as the reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq

“America is fighting this enemy in Iraq

because that is where they have gathered

We are there because, after 9/11,

we decided to deny terrorists any safe haven”

I have seen my share of crazy people, and I know the difference between a charming eccentric and a first-class wall job.

And Dick Cheney, who has been riding the scree into a personal hell at an alarmingly dizzy rate for the past six years, has finally reached the point where he is simply certifiable.

Not off-center. Not in denial. Not partisan. Not . . . not . . . not even delusional.

The man is a 24-karat nutcase who should be locked in his undisclosed location and allowed to rub his hands as he plans to take over the world.

Except this time, he should be talking to an interactive James Bond video game or conversing with the ghost of Dr. Evil from Austin Powers.

Can't someone just shut him up? I know I'm not the only person who is sick of Dick Cheney's blustering belligerence.

Hell, by now you would think that even some of his allies in the GWOT are tired of his Darth Vader-like presence issuing threats to nations and groups opposed to his posse's designs for world domination.

Threats, mind you, that when they have come to fruition have cost him nothing in terms of power, money, or blood. Threats, mind you, that have cost many others plenty of all three.

Cheney has been head of the bush Regime's’s Ministry of Truth since day one.
“The terrorists don’t expect to beat us in a stand-up fight. They never have. They’re not likely to try. The only way they can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon our mission.”

This inflated and meaningless statement is devoid of argument and substance; it is meant to do only this - excite fear, and impugn the patriotic resolve of his opponents.

He invokes “the terrorists” - perhaps the sectarian militia at war with one another, each jockeying to occupy the power vacuum that we created - to make you think that this war has anything to do with the War on Terror.

He invokes “nerve” and “a stand-up fight” to remind you that the Democrats have no nerve, and would lose a stand-up fight - and to remind you that Nerve is “Five-Deferment” Cheney’s middle name.

He wants you to fear debate—a sign of weakness; he wants to remind you to be afraid. Above all, he wants you not to question; if you do, your patriotism is itself in question.

Cheney has hidden behind the rhetoric of fear and patriotism from the moment he stepped into office; he, like too many politicians, uses words not to elucidate, but to obscure and misdirect.

The really mind-numbing thing, though, is that we let him get away with it—again, and again, and again. This is not so much his failure as it is ours.

Fear-Mongering and Fiction: Cheney Addresses West Point Graduates

With the poise and purpose that has been drilled into them during the past four years, the cadets filed slowly into West Point’s Michie Stadium in crisp lines, standing at attention as they reached their seats.

Here stood the graduates of the nation’s premier military academy, nearly a thousand of them, who would soon swear the oath of the United States Army and be commissioned as second lieutenants.

The class of 2007, the first to enter the academy after the invasion of Iraq, has chosen the motto “Always Remember, Never Surrender” and a crest that includes these words emblazoned above a scene that shows the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Before long, it’s likely that many of these men and women will deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, complex and asymmetric battlefields that have forced the military to rethink its approach to warfare.

The nature of the war on terror has caused the staid military academy itself to revisit its curriculum.

In Iraq and Afghanistan these soon-to-be officers will lead platoons, where they will be called upon to carry out their missions not just as soldiers, but as diplomats and cops and sometimes a combination of the three.

Cheney, on hand to deliver this year’s commencement address, acknowledged that this crop of West Point grads is unique.

“It is rare in West Point history for a class to have joined during war time and graduate in the midst of that same war,” he said.

Addressing the academy’s graduates, the vice president, who drew a crowd of protestors outside one of West Point’s gates, relied on the same brand of doomsday rhetoric that has characterized his remarks since 9/11.

“We know,” he told the audience at one point, that Al Qaeda is “working feverishly to obtain even more destructive weapons and using every form of technology they can get their hands on.

"This makes the business of fighting this war as urgent and time sensitive as any task this nation has ever taken on.”

Not only is the threat real, he warned, it’s immediate. “The timeline is no longer a calendar, it’s a watch,” he said, quoting a line used recently by Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence. Cheney then claimed that the “enemy likely has cells inside our own country.”

As Cheney told the graduates of the enemies they may soon face — terrorists “who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character” — there were moments when it seemed that he had simply recycled an old speech from 2002.

Indeed, long after most members of the Bush administration have distanced themselves from some of the more insidious claims that propelled the U.S. into war with Iraq, the vice president continues to repeat them as fact.

At one point today he cited the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda (which has been thoroughly debunked) as the reason why the U.S. invaded Iraq.

“America is fighting this enemy in Iraq because that is where they have gathered,” he told the West Point graduates. “We are there because, after 9/11, we decided to deny terrorists any safe haven.”

In a subtle irony, the vice president last addressed graduating West Point cadets the very year the class of 2007 entered the academy, in 2003.

It was close to a month after the president declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq and Cheney crowed that “the battle of Iraq was a major victory in the war on terror.”

At the time, two West Point graduates had been killed in Iraq. Since then an additional 49 tombstones have risen on West Point’s campus, marking the graves of graduates who were killed in Iraq, fighting a war the vice president had previously assured them they’d already won. Paul McLeary @ Mother Jones