Reality To Vice President Cheney: 'Go Fuck Yourself'

While President Bush attempted- by increasingly low White House standards anyway- to appear apolitical on the anniversary, Cheney was... well, Cheney-

Vice President Cheney offered a veiled attack yesterday on critics of the administration's Iraq policy, saying the domestic debate over the war is emboldening adversaries who believe they can undermine the resolve of the American people.

"They can't beat us in a stand-up fight -- they never have -- but they're absolutely convinced they can break our will, [that] the American people don't have the stomach for the fight," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The vice president said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq "have doubts" the United States will finish the job there. "And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we've had in the United States," he said. "Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists."...

Has there ever been a Vice President in the history of the United States with as low an opinion, and as hostile an attitude, toward the American people? This man seems to deplore the very country that he rules over.

What Democrats should be making clear in no uncertain terms- besides the fact that Cheney is a senile madman- is the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq in order to solidify the misguided and delusional priorities of the President and his party. They abandoned the former mission to (wrongly) start the latter... and that has left us increasingly vulnerable with depleted resources and far too many dead. Furthermore, since the President has made clear he will never change course and that he is simply marking time until leaving this mess to his successor, it is vital that we have a Congress that recognizes we are mired in a no-win situation and takes the necessary steps to bring this war to a conclusion.

I think Salon's Tim Greave said it best last month in rebutting another of Cheney's rants: "The case for withdrawal is pretty simple: We shouldn't have invaded Iraq in the first place, and the cost of staying there -- in lives, in money, in the lost opportunities to deal with Osama bin Laden or Iran or North Korea -- far exceeds whatever marginal benefit there may be in staying the course, which is serving mostly to make Americans a target and create a dangerous sort of codependency on the part of the Iraqi government and its fledgling security forces."

Democrats, take some notes. That's the simple case you need to be making to voters.

Finally, reality (a well-known terrorist appeaser) has more bad news for Mr. Cheney-

The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

The officials described Col. Pete Devlin's classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq...

Had enough?