Dick Cheney is Correct…..Politically

Dick Cheney is a genius! It’s hard to imagine how one man, that currently has no position of authority, can shape the outcomes of future political debates. I’m obviously talking about his “Obama made America less safe” tour de force on the Sunday morning talk shows. Now, while most people loathe him, and most Republicans want him off the national stage, and most Democrats are ecstatic over his unwillingness to leave, I respectfully disagree. I think he is the best thing going for the GOP and has put future Democrats back into a George McGovern-esque hole that took 30 years to climb out of.

Let’s start at the beginning, one of the major knocks on the Democrats and liberals is that they are soft on national security and have a doe-eyed view on foreign policy. They are seen as a group of kumbaya singing, “why can’t we all just get along” hippies that think the world could be made into a better place if we just practice some soft diplomacy. This label makes me sick to my stomach, because it’s the Conservative Hawks that have a simple minded view of the world; Dick Cheney and his pals at the Weekly Standard are war-bent ideologues who believe in unilateral heavy handed diplomacy and preventative wars that make us less safe and more hated around the world. That being said, unfortunately it’s the Democrats that have historically lost the foreign policy debate.

Up until now that is.  The last five years have proven just how much damage a Republican foreign policy approach can have in a short time. Their unilateralism has alienated us from the rest of the world. The Iraq debacle has proven the utter stupidity of a preventive war. Also, the administrations’ callous attitude towards funding VA hospitals has left a lot of military families out in the cold. Did I mention the torture memos fiasco? Needless to say, this less then stellar track record has left Republicans without one of their most powerful attacks on Democrats. And that’s a big hit, since strong foreign policy is a full third of the GOP platform along with social and fiscal conservatism.

All this changed with Dick’s one masterful stroke. By making the claim that Obama has made America less safe, he has set the GOP up for the ultimate “I told you so”, one that could ultimately bring them back to power. Unfortunately, terrorism has become all too common in today’s society and will definitely happen again, considering we are in the midst of two wars, a rising religious extremism, and the increasing ease of travel. If it happens under a Democratic watch, it will swing the foreign policy pendulum back to the Hawks and the GOP could ride that all the way back to a majority or even a presidency.

“Not fair” you say? “It was Bush who could have stopped 9/11 and didn’t” you proclaim. “It’s the Iraq war, entered under a false presence that was coaxed out of tortured detainees, which made us less safe. Needlessly killing thousands of soldiers.” You bemoan. “Waterboarding isn’t practiced by Israel in ticking bomb situations and they live with terrorism everyday.” You exclaim. “After Abu Ghraib, all harsh interrogation techniques were stopped by all agencies. So from 2005 to 2009 did Cheney make us less safe by stopping these practices?” you ask.

And that’s how Dick Cheney put the Democrats on the defensive. Now I’m not saying he will ultimately win this debate, but it’s definitely the best hand the Republicans had to play and he was the perfect man to play it.