Cheney uncharacteristically defensive trying to explain statements

[dajoki]

NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/washington/11cheney.html?ex=1315627200&en=5f4eaea7d56195c2&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Cheney Returns to a 9/11 Forum for Iraq Defense

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: September 11, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday backed away from his insistence last year that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes,’’ but in a contentious television interview he said that even if he had known in 2003 that his claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were mistaken, “we’d do exactly the same thing.’’

Mr. Cheney’s appearance on “Meet the Press’’ on NBC was part of the administration’s drive before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to change the minds of Americans who tell pollsters that they now believe the invasion of Iraq was a misguided diversion in the battle against terrorism.

By the end of the interview he appeared to be preparing the ground for arguments that the country would be far less safe if Republicans lost control of one or both houses of Congress in the November elections.

Mr. Cheney, who is rarely challenged in public, was returning to a forum he used just after the terrorist attacks and just before the Iraq war.

He sounded uncharacteristically defensive at moments, particularly as he tried to explain statements he had made over the past five years about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda.

[Monkeyman]

1. Bottem line we are less safe with these pukes in charge

[eleny]

2. So, he would have taken the country to war anyway?

As if it didn't take Congress to approve that. As if the American people had no say in the matter. Hubris, your name is Cheney.

[dajoki]

5. It was planned...

before they ever took office.

[eleny]

7. Sure - but they still needed approval and it would not have been given

Not if Congress knew then what it knows now.

[dajoki]

9. I was against it...

from the start and Congress only knows what it knows now because we went in.

[eleny]

10. Your assertion about how Congress knows what it knows is moot

I'm addressing Russert's question and Cheney's response.

[dajoki]

12. Of course it's moot...

but so is the statement that Congress would not have voted for the war had it known what it does now. As far as Cheney, goes he's just lying like the rest of them.

[eleny]

13. Absolutely.

[blondeatlast]

3. That's what we're talking about. corner 'em into the fire

and don't let up, not for a moment.

Push em close enough and they will fall in on their own!

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

4. Well of course. He DID know the WMD claims were "mistaken", and they

took the nation to war. So of course they'd do exactly the same.

[HuffleClaw]

6. he HATES being challenged on anything

i bet russert had him for lunch.

[AZCat]

8. This summer I read "The Guns of August"...

and as I read the above article I was reminded of the reaction the German war planners had when it looked like they might not be going to war after all. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, it seems, would not have let anything stop their invasion and subsequent occupation, least of all any niggling cries of "evidence" or "just cause" from those who believe in such "quaint notions", not because they don't care about such things (although it seems so) but because they had done all this work to get ready and they weren't about to let it all go to waste.

[SteppingRazor]

11. Cheney just learned that it's tough to defend the indefensible n/t