The Crazy Aunt In The Basement Speaks

by digby

… at the big CPAC convention:

“If our coalition withdrew before Iraqis could defend themselves, radical factions would battle for dominance. The violence would likely spread throughout the country and be very difficult to contain. Having tasted victory in Iraq, the (militants) would look for new missions. Many would head for Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban,” Cheney said.

He said others would head for capitals across the Middle East and work to undermine moderate governments. “Still others would find their targets and victims in other countries on other continents. Such chaos and mounting danger does not have to occur. It is, however, the enemy’s objective,” Cheney said.

“In these circumstances, it’s worth reminding ourselves that, like it or not, the enemy we face in the war on terror has made Iraq the primary front in that war,” he added. Then, to laughter and applause, Cheney said, “To use a popular phrase, this is an inconvenient truth.”

And like it or not, the abject failure of the Bush administration’s unnecessary and illegal war in Iraq which led them to incompetently wage the war in Afghanistan means that the Taliban and al Qaeda still exist and Osama bin laden and Mullah Omar are still at large. You’d think this notion that we’re fighting them in Bagdad so we don’t have to fight them in Kabul and elsewhere would sound a little bit silly considering that Cheney himself was targeted in Afghanistan just this week, but logic has never been their strong suit.

He’s very worried that terrorists are going to think we’re weak and attack us. Call me crazy but it seems to me that the fact that we made fools of ourselves with all the faulty WMD talk and have bungled the occupation of Iraq so badly that the country has devloved into civil war is a much more obvious object lesson in American weakness. In fact, we have exposed ourselves as so inept that we are far more vulnerable than we were before 9/11 on a strategic global level. When a great and powerful nation reveals itself to be the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, minor despots and rival powers tend to make some dangerous calculations.

“If you support the war on terror, then it only makes sense to support it where the terrorists are fighting us,” Cheney said.

And due to the Bush administration’s malfeasance, error and corruption, Muslim fanaticism and terrorism have become far more powerful and pervasive today than when Bush and Cheney took office.

Meanwhile, elsewhere at CPAC, the GOP faithful of faithful seem a little bit blah this year. Bill Sher is blogging it here. Ben Shapiro tries to get lathered about lesbianism but he ends up sounding a little bit wistful:

When society tolerates deviance … it normalizes deviance … lesbianism among young women has risen dramatically in the last 10 years alone. And that is certainly due to media and advertising, and certainly also because of the fact that we decide to tolerate it.

It’s really not up to his usual standards.

If you are unfamiliar with the psycho-convention that calls itself CPAC, read this fantastic article about the 2003 convention from Michele Goldberg in Salon:

Bush is revered so intensely among CPACers that all successes seem to issue from him, while failures are the fault of others unworthy of the great man. Jason Crawford, a 23-year-old who works in business development in New York, formed his group Patriots for the Defense of America right after Sept. 11 to promote “moral clarity” in the war on terror. Now, convinced that moral clarity requires attacking North Korea and fomenting revolution in Iran, he’s disappointed in the administration. Yet speaking along with Oliver North (who ranted against the “brie-eating, foie gras-sucking French”) at the “What Are We Fighting For?” panel, he put the blame not on Bush, but on some amorphous “us” who failed to rise to Bush’s challenge. “Today we can see from our actions that we lack moral clarity,” he told the crowd. “We are betraying the principles of the Bush doctrine!”

Rev. Lou Sheldon, the founder of the Traditional Values Coalition and sworn enemy of homosexuality, put it best. Asked if Bush was in sync with his agenda, he replied, “George Bush is our agenda!”

But Sheldon, a plump, pink man with pale blue eyes, wasn’t out celebrating the Bush presidency. Instead, the man who has pledged “open warfare” against all things gay, stood in the exhibitors hall before a makeshift carnival game called “Tip a Troll,” in which players were invited to throw gray beanbags at toy trolls with the heads of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle, or trolls holding signs saying, “The Homosexual Agenda,” “Roe V. Wade” and “The Liberal Media.”

Sheldon, like the rest of the right, isn’t letting success distract from a monomaniacal focus on its foes. Indeed, the overwhelming message at CPAC was that it’s time to toughen up.

At a Thursday seminar titled “2002 and Beyond: Are Liberals an Endangered Species?” Paul Rodriguez, managing editor of the conservative magazine Insight, warned that the liberal beast wouldn’t be vanquished until conservatives learn to be merciless. “One thing Democrats have long known how to do is play hardball,” he intoned, urging Republicans to adopt more “bare-knuckle” tactics.

I hear that they’re having a big 71% off sale on last year’s biggest selling item:

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