When you don't have any answers, it's best not to have any shame -- Cheney's "wrong choice;" Part II

On 9-8-04 we did a post entitled "Thanks Mr. Cheney, we needed that freebie -- Post RNC one step back by Kerry and two forward (for Kerry) by Cheney." Rather than Part I, that post should have been called "the bones," and today's post will be "the meat."

The two steps forward part -- that is, the bones -- was as follows:

"Post RNC two steps forward (for Kerry) by Cheney: Cheney warns of risk if 'we make the wrong choice.'"

The meat is found in Red Scare, Updated, by Richard Cohen, 9-09-04 in the Washington Post:

Let's play a political word-association game. You say "blue" and I say "red." You say "swift" and I say "boat." You say "Cheney" and I say "Welch" and you ask me what in the world do I mean. And I say that when Dick Cheney warned that the election of John Kerry would increase the risk of a terrorist attack, I immediately thought of Joseph Welch, the patrician Boston attorney who confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy back in 1954 and asked, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The answer in McCarthy's case was no. It is no different with Cheney.
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This isn't all the meat. More will come. Cheney will regret his statement, just as we said Kerry would his "yes" answer. Kerry's "yes" was dumb; Cheney's is worst than dumb.
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The post is over on the meat, but two more excerpts from the editorial:

The vice president is the Chicken Little of the Bush administration, whose dire warnings of this or that never materialize. He insisted, for instance, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, both a scary prospect and reason enough for war. Trouble was, Iraq had dismantled that program, which, as even Bush might fathom, is not the same thing.

It was Cheney, too, who insisted against all evidence -- or, to be precise, in the absence of any -- that a substantive link existed between bin Laden and Hussein's regime. If you only knew what I knew, Cheney essentially said, but all the agencies of government that did know what Cheney knew concluded otherwise. No matter. Once again, Cheney simply said what was politically advantageous. If Massachusetts becomes a battleground state, look for Cheney to convert to Catholicism.