Considering he's tied up with two countries desperately in need of change, Vice President Cheney's dogged promises that he'd do the exact same thing if faced with the question of invading Iraq again made him look deluded, at best, and in utter disregard for the lives lost, at worst. And on kitchen-table issues like health care, jobs and taxes, Cheney's debate line was to promise more of the same—despite the fact that working families have seen a sharp decline in their standards of living in the past four years. Robert Borosage says the vice president has taken a long trip away from reality.
Robert L. Borosage , a veteran strategist and institution builder, is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future.
The invasion of Iraq, Vice President Cheney told us last night in the debate, was “exactly the right thing to do.” If he had to the make the same decision, he volunteered, he’d follow “exactly the same course of action.” Re-elect President Bush, he argued, for more of the same, at home and abroad. In contrast, Sen. John Edwards promised a “fresh start” with John Kerry, arguing “the country can’t take four more years of this kind of experience.”
Cheney’s implacable statement on Iraq is breathtaking in its utter disregard for the reality on the ground. It comes on the day that Prime Minister Allawi, the former CIA agent appointed interim head of Iraq, warned about the unstable security situation. It came on the day Paul Bremer, the administration’s main man in Iraq, admitted the catastrophic mistake of not having sufficient troops to secure Iraq after the invasion. It came after official confirmation that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, his army was in tatters, he was delusional and his regime was growing ever weaker. It came after the proof that there was no cooperation between Al Qaeda and Hussein, and the revelation that Mr. Bush’s own counterterrorist czar, Richard Clarke, had warned the invasion of Iraq would be a disastrous diversion from the war on terror.
This inescapable reality—the rising cost in lives and resources of the Iraq quagmire—does not inform the views or the policies of the president or Mr. Cheney. Cheney once more peddled the fiction that there was an ”established relationship” with Al Qaeda. He asserted once more that Hussein represented the major threat to give nuclear, biological or chemical weapons to terrorists, apparently forgetting that he possessed no such weapons to give (and never exhibited any such intent.)
Like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, Cheney was saying that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Truth has no claim on the president or vice president, Cheney seems to suggest, so long as they are the masters.
When the debate turned at long last to kitchen-table concerns, it was more of the same: trumpet success in purblind denial of reality and promise more of the same. On education, Cheney asserted No Child Left Behind is a grand success, ignoring the revolt of even Republican state legislatures, the distress of the teachers, the broken promise to fund the reforms by a total of $27 billion, much less the reality of the challenges facing our schools. On health care, he touted the prescription drug bill that actually prohibits Medicare from negotiating a better price for seniors. And of course, he ignored the conclusion of the independent Consumer’s Union that the sellout to drug companies will leave most seniors paying more for their drugs.
And on taxes, he asserted that the economy was in terrific shape, nothing need be changed, the tax cuts need only be made permanent. Ignore the worst job record since the Great Depression, the decline in family income, the rise in health care costs, the loss of more than two million manufacturing jobs. And of course, Cheney didn’t bother to explain how the Bush tax cut, cobbled together in 2000 when the country enjoyed prosperity and the budget was in surplus, could remain impervious to change as the country descended into recession, the attacks of 9/11 and record budget deficits. What once was a way to distribute the surplus was justified as a way to stimulate the economy. But since the package wasn’t designed for that, it is not surprising that it has not worked. Mr. Bush mortgaged the store, running up record deficits, but produced fewer jobs than his own economists predicted the economy would create without the tax cuts.
Edwards was effective at drawing the contrasts, even as Cheney was remorseless in his attack on the Democratic ticket. But what their clashes made clear was that while Kerry and Edwards offer the chance of a “fresh start,” Bush and Cheney offer only more of the same: the same policy and the same utter disregard for reality. The only question is “which is to be master—that’s all.”
