Cheney addressing the latest attempt by Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab to blow up an airliner in flight said in his acerbic statement:

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.”

Cheney also said Obama outwardly “pretends we aren’t at war” and he repeated his months-long criticism that the new president has made America “less safe.”

Cheney also asked in his patented sardonic way:

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.”

Cheney seems to think we are at war with a state. Wrong. We are at war with an ideology. There are no western fronts to line up the artillery and blast them to smithereens, or unload the latest 30,000 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb on the communication center. Even Patton couldn’t pull this one off.

These guy’s communication center is a cave somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Cheney blasts the current administration for the exact same decision the Bush administration made with Richard Reid, you know, the shoe bomber? Bush was on vacation when that incident happened. 6 days later he made a comment.

Reid was tried, convicted and sentenced in Federal court. Same with Zacarias Moussaoui.

Apparently, Cheney doesn’t have any faith in a U.S. Justice Department when he is not pulling the strings. I guess he is also still pissed that Scooter Libby didn’t get off scott free.

Cheney is trying to put the Obama administration in as bad a light as he can so he hopes the public will forget just what deep shit the Bush administration (with his blessing, of course) put us in. Their administration drove us to the brink of financial insolvency, started a war with a country that had zero to do with the 9/11 attacks, and alienated the U.S. from all but our stanchest allies.  

9/11 happened on the Bush/Cheney watch. We should never forget that. They had the intelligence that Bin Laden was going to try something, but they sat on that. Then they blamed Iraq, and started that war and basically forgot about Afghanistan.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer wrote on the official White House blog:

It is telling that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the Administration than condemning the attackers…

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…

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.

Strangely off-key indeed. Turn in your U.S. lapel pin Mr. Cheney. If you think our government isn’t doing all that’s humanly possible to protect you, then leave. Your vitriolic partisan bullshit is no longer relevant.

 And the government officials are out trying to calm the masses.

Here’s how you can calm us. Anyone that is on any list (other than the no fly list of course.  If they get on an airplane, then we are all sunk anyway), or in any watch database gets intensive screening, Israeli style. Pat downs, put through the “puffer” machine, interrogate them, let the dogs have a sniff…the whole nine yards. I guess the argument would be that there are ~1 million people on the various lists. The counter to that is how many at any one time are attempting to fly? 1%? 5%? Put the mechanism and people in place to make sure anyone who is deemed a threat at least gets properly screened.

Who knows, you might even get enough information to take them off the list.

“Massive” databases and lists shouldn’t be the excuse. My PC can sort through a million records in a couple of seconds. The key is the proper management of the information, and the execution of the plan once one of these folks try to get on a plane.

It’s time to meet the airliner terrorist threat with overwhelming force.