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Thursday, January 25, 2007

Vice President Cheney slaps CNN's Wolf Blitzer all over the studio


I would have had a tough time believing that CNN's Wolf Blitzer could be more inane or contemptible, but he definitely proved me wrong.

Yesterday, he interviewed Vice president Dick Cheney and ended up getting his head handed to him..especially when he brought Cheney's lesbian daughter into the mix from out of nowhere.

You can read CNN's transcript in two parts, here and here, but I'll give you some of the juiciest bits:


BLITZER: The criticism is that took your eye off the ball by going into Iraq and, in effect, reducing the focus of attention on al Qaeda and bin Laden.

CHENEY: It's just not true. I've heard that charge. It's simply not true, Wolf. The fact of the matter is we can do more than one thing at a time. And we have. And we've been very successful with going after al Qaeda. They're still out there. They're still a formidable force. But they're not nearly as formidable as they once were, in terms of numbers and so forth.

We have...

BLITZER: There's some experts who think they're...

CHENEY: We have...

BLITZER: ... even a greater threat today.

CHENEY: We have successfully defended the country for over five years against any further attacks. They've tried, we know, repeatedly. The president talked about it last night in his speech. We know they tried last summer to capture airliners coming out of the U.K. and to blow them up over the United States or over the Atlantic. There have been numerous attacks have been disrupted.

It's been a remarkable performance by the U.S. military and by our intelligence service and everything else.

If you had asked, shortly after 9/11, what the odds were that we could go better than five years without another attack on the homeland, I don't think anybody would have been willing to take that bet.

The fact is we've been enormously successful in that regard. We still, obviously, want to get Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri. But we've had great success against al Qaeda.

(notice how this worm constantly interrupts and tries to talk over Cheney?)

BLITZER: How much responsibility do you have, though -- do you and the administration -- for this potential scenario?

CHENEY: Well, you know, this is the argument that there wouldn't be any problem if we hadn't gone into Iraq.

Now...

BLITZER: Well, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. CHENEY: Saddam Hussein would still be in power. He would, at this point, be engaged in a nuclear arms race with Ahmadinejad, his blood enemy next door in Iran.

BLITZER: But he was being contained...

CHENEY: He was...

BLITZER: ... as you well know...

CHENEY: He was not being contained...

BLITZER: ... by the no-fly zones in the north...

CHENEY: He was not being contained.

BLITZER: ... and in the south.

CHENEY: Wolf, the entire sanctions regime had been undermined by Saddam Hussein. He had...

BLITZER: But he didn't have stockpiles of weapons of...

CHENEY: He had corrupted the entire effort to try to keep him contained. He was bribing senior officials of other governments. The Oil For Food Program had been totally undermined. And he had, in fact, produced and used weapons of mass destruction previously, and he retained the capability to produce that kind of stuff in the future.

You can go back...

BLITZER: But that was in the '80s.


(gee, Blitzer..the UN's oil for food scandal wasn't even revealed until after we invaded and captured the documents that revealed it!)

CHENEY: You can go back and argue the whole thing all over again, Wolf. But what we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do. The world is much safer today because of it. There have been three national elections in Iraq. There's a democracy established there, a constitution, a new democratically elected government. Saddam has been brought to justice and executed. His sons are dead. His government is gone. And the world is better off for it.

You can argue about that all you want. That's history.

(SMACK!!)

Blitzer: And it's not just Jim Webb; it's some of your good Republican friends in the Senate and the House are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders, of the failures. Gordon Smith...

Cheney: Wolf...

Blitzer: Gordon Smith...

Cheney: Wolf, I simply don't accept the premise of your question. I just think it's hogwash.

Blitzer: That what? There were no blunders? The president himself says...

Cheney: Remember me -- remember with me what happened in Afghanistan. The United States was actively involved in Afghanistan in the '80s, supported the effort against the Soviets. The mujahideen prevailed and everybody walked away. And in Afghanistan, within relatively short order, the Taliban came to power.

They created a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Training camps were established, where some 20,000 terrorists trained in the late '90s. And out of that, out of Afghanistan -- because we walked away and ignored it -- we had the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the embassies in East Africa and 9/11, where the people trained and planned in Afghanistan for that attack and killed 3,000 Americans. That is what happens when we walk away from a situation like that in the Middle East.

(However much I disagree with the way the Administration has handled Iraq, what the Vice President is saying here is the simple truth. And our decision to go in there was the right one.)

(And here's where it gets particularly slimy, as Blitzer tries to slime Cheney over his gay daughter in the closing seconds...)

Blitzer: We're out of time, but a couple of issues I want to raise with you. Your daughter, Mary. She's pregnant. All of us are happy. She's going to have a baby, you're going to have another grandchild. Some of the -- some critics, though, are suggesting -- for example, a statement from someone representing Focus on the Family, "Mary Cheney's pregnancy raises the question of what's best for children. Just because it's possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn't mean it's best for the child." Do you want to respond to that?

(At this point, Cheney glares at Blitzer until Wolfie begins to visibly melt..)

Cheney: No, I don't.

Blitzer: obviously, a good daughter...

Cheney: I'm delighted -- I'm delighted I'm about to have a sixth grandchild, Wolf. And obviously I think the world of both my daughters and all of my grandchildren. And I think, frankly, you're out of line with that question.

Blitzer: I think all of us appreciate...

Cheney: I think you're out of line.

(At this point, Cheney would probably have challenged Wolfie to a duel in a previous age)

Blitzer: ... your daughters. No, we like your daughters. Believe me, I'm very, very sympathetic to Liz and to Mary. I like them both. That was just a question that's come up, and it's a responsible, fair question.

Cheney: I just fundamentally disagree with you.

Blitzer: I want to congratulate you on having another grandchild.

(Sure you do, Blitzer.....sure you do.)

The above is an example of what happens when a man interacts with a rat.

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