Powell responds to Limbaugh and Cheney:
They have their own ‘version’ of the GOP
ThinkProgress
May 20, 2009Earlier this month, Rush Limbaugh declared, “What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat.” Days later, Dick Cheney said that he would rather have Limbaugh in the GOP than Powell. “My take on it was that Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican,” Cheney said. Yesterday, Powell responded to the duo, issuing a sharp rebuke to them for attempting to marginalize his role in the party:
“Rush Limbaugh says, ‘Get out of the Republican Party.’ Dick Cheney says, ‘He’s already out.’ I may be out of their version of the Republican Party, but there’s another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again,” Powell told the crowd.
President Barack Obama will attempt to regain control of a boiling debate over anti-terrorism policy with a major speech on Thursday — an address that comes on the same day that former Vice President Dick Cheney will be weighing in with his own speech on the same theme. The dueling speeches amount to the most direct engagement so far between Obama and his conservative critics in the volatile argument over what tactics are justified in detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.
The national security debate — egged on by frequent charges from Cheney that Obama is leaving the country more vulnerable to attack — is the only subject on which many Republicans believe they have been able to gain traction against a popular president and the Democratic majority that now dominate Washington.
But, as described by administration sources, Obama’s speech is also intended to quiet the ire aimed at him from the political left. Some activists are furious over his recent decisions on continuing military commissions rather than civilian trials for suspected terrorists, and his about-face in deciding to fight a court order releasing photos of detainees undergoing abuse. Obama advisers are comparing Thursday’s speech to his big-picture Georgetown University speech on the economy last month — not intended necessarily to produce “hard news” but a sustained effort to describe and defend his policies and the political and intellectual assumptions behind them.
A centerpiece of the president’s speech will be his plans for dispersing the detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Senate Democrats, running from the White House as never before this year, moved Tuesday to withhold $80 million he had requested to close the prison by early next year. In response, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs promised “a more detailed plan.”
Cheney will be speaking at 10:45 a.m. on “Keeping America Safe: An Address by Dick Cheney” during a 45-minute appearance at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Cheney will take questions during his open-press appearance, which was scheduled several weeks ago…
CNN and MSNBC will apparently broadcast former VP Cheney’s torture speech live tomorrow.
After all these years, I still don’t really understand the motor that drives this machine. It really does feel to me like they can’t conceptualize a world without the "Cold War" – like it was our finest hour and we must get back there as soon as possible. If you’ve never read it, the PNAC 2000 Report Rebuilding America’s Defenses makes their strategy beyond clear. The premise then was that President Clinton had allowed the American Military to deteriorate after the fall of the Berlin Wall, saying that Clinton was living off of "Reagan’s investments." It was a detailed report, but in the end the bottom line was to increase Military spending dramatically – and there were all kind of specific recommendations for various fancy weaponry to invest in. The premise was that our "Defenses" were inadequate.So they came into office, and we got attacked by 19 guys with Home Depot Razor Blade Package openers who learned how to take off but not how to land airplanes. Their only technology was whatever it takes to con people into suicide missions. All those fancy Military Systems didn’t help.
But that didn’t dissuade the Neocons. Instead of attacking our desert rat enemy directly, they invaded the country of a Middle Eastern blowhard they knew they could beat and created a learning lab for the suicide and roadside bombers, recruiting new members for them by mistreating anybody that our forces got hold of. It was a miserable failure and they’ve been removed from office "for cause."
Tomorrow, we’re going to hear Cheney tell us why going paranoid was a good idea, and how we should continue to approach the world with his doomsday mentality – torturing, imprisoning, intimidating, treating the rest of the world as less than, living with him on the ‘dark side’ of his own creation. It’s become increasingly clear that much of the chaos of the world is something we have had a real part in – that our imprudent showing of strength has in fact weakened our actual defenses and our world position.
When I look back on these last years, I see Colin Powell as part of a huge tragedy. The Neoconservatives saw our own State Department as an enemy. Her name was Madeleine Albright – she was a woman, she was Clinton’s Secretary of State, and she was good at her job. The Neocons hated her and the idea of Diplomacy in general, wanting to return to the era of strength and intimidation. They didn’t like the U.N. either. It was just in the way, watering down things rather than solving problems the right way – War. In the run up to the Iraq War, they actually bugged the U.N. to find out what was going on. Then Bush appointed the major opponent to the U.N., John Bolton from A.E.I., over the objections of almost everyone on the planet. And they appointed a popular wartime General as Secretary of State [Colin Powell].
Powell tried to actually do his job, but was overwhelmed by the Cheney/Rumsfeld machine – ultimately sacrificing himself in a U.N. speech advocating the Invasion of Iraq. It was a moment of shame for the United States, for Colin Powell, and for the U.N. itself. Now he’s being villified by Cheney and a few other Republicans because he won’t join the March of the Crazies that is currently being mounted in Washington. In spite of his U.N. speech, I miss Colin Powell. I hope he will stick around and become the nidus of some revival of sanity in the Republican Party.
While the Powell comments and tomorrow’s speeches got me thinking about what I wanted to say in this post, my thoughts ran further. Right now, it seems to me that there are two Republican Parties – both out on a limb. The Conservatives are mainly the vocal Congressmen who are preaching the gospel of small hands-off government, fiscal responsibility, and anti-socialism. The Neoconservatives are the paranoid Hawks lead by Cheney and all of the people at A.E.I. Neither group has a leg to stand on, but my point right now is that they don’t even seem like the are part of the same political party. The first group is trying to defend a position clearly responsible for the worst economy in nearly a century. The second group is defending an un-necessary war and a complete failure to engage our real enemy.
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