Political Irony

Many people have theorized that Dubya wanted to invade Iraq in order to gain retribution for (or just one-up) his father’s failure to topple Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.

Well, it seems like we might have something of the same thing going on between Liz Cheney and her father. Dick Cheney was chronically unpopular as Vice President, and Liz seems to be trying to make herself not just unpopular with liberals who hated Cheney but with everyone else, including conservatives. When someone like Kenneth Starr starts calling Liz’s latest attacks “shameful” you know she has sunk to a new low. And I agree.

So what has she done? Liz Cheney is in charge of the group “Keep America Safe” [now defunct -iron] that advocates for keeping Gitmo open, the use of torture, and other dubious activities that have caused the US so much trouble without actually keeping us any safer. So what could she possibly do that was even more shameful? She attacked lawyers!

Keep America Safe has spent the last two weeks going after a few current Justice department lawyers because (before they joined Obama’s Justice Department) they “represented or advocated for terrorist detainees”. In other words, if you get thrown into Gitmo because you are suspected of being a terrorist (and even our government acknowledges that a fair number of the people there are actually innocent), not only do you not get a real trial, but you shouldn’t even get a lawyer. She even tried to brand those lawyers as “The Al-Qaeda 7“.

Which means that Liz Cheney is denouncing the rule of law, the right to a fair trial, the Geneva Convention, and our pesky old Constitution. It makes me sick. I don’t care if this is merely a cheap partisan attack against the Obama administration, or if she is trying to rehabilitate her father’s reputation, or even if she actually believes this crap.

The only silver lining? The outrage against her attacks is the most bipartisan thing I’ve seen in a while.

© Matt Bors

© Jim Morin

In The American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord wrote:

President Obama and his liberal allies will surely now concede that their push to spend trillions, a push that they intend to use as an excuse resulting in higher taxes, is responsible for sending this apparently crazed pilot plunging into this Austin IRS headquarters.

A while ago, we gave you ten ironic reasons to support health care reform, but now we (finally) can give you an ironic reason (albeit just one) to not be too concerned about global warming (we know you were desperately looking for a reason to ignore it).

A panel of 41 international experts has reviewed all the existing evidence on the massive Cretaceous-Teriary extinction, which killed off over two-thirds of the species on earth including the dinosaurs, and has concluded that it was caused by a 15km wide asteroid that slammed into the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago. The impact resulted in a crater whose walls were (briefly) as high as the Himalayas, and ejected so much material into the atmosphere that temperatures plunged, wiping out most of the life on earth in a matter of days. Clearly, a change in global climate can cause major problems to life on earth.

But there is a bright side to this story. The study concludes:

These terrifying events led to darkness and a global winter, resulting in the extinction of more than 70% of known species. The tiny shrew-like mammals which were around at that time proved better adapted to survival than the cumbersome dinosaurs, and the removal of these dominant animals paved the way for the radiation of the mammals and eventual emergence of humans on Earth.

So I guess that if we are too stupid and cumbersome to overcome global warming, we might just be paving the way for some other — smarter — species to become the new dominant animals.

Maybe cockroaches?

Do you remember Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) who stood up in Congress and said that the Republican health care plan was “Don’t get sick” and if you do get sick to “Die Quickly”. At the time, Republicans vowed to target Grayson and defeat him.

So how’s that working out? Well, they certainly found people to run against him. In fact, there are 13 Republicans running in the Republican primary. But in a recent poll, the person who Republicans would choose to run against Grayson, is Grayson himself! In fact, in the poll, Grayson got more votes than all of the (real) Republican candidates combined.

There are a number of possible explanations for this:

• Republicans in Florida vote based on name recognition only.
• Republicans admire Grayson for standing up for what he believes in, even though what he believes is that the Republicans are “knuckle-dragging Neanderthals”.
• The poll also found that some of the support comes from Republicans who admire Grayson for defending the US Constitution. Grayson carries a copy of the Constitution with him, and in 2009 passed a resolution calling for schools to dedicate a week in September for teaching the Constitution. This September, he will be teaching the Constitution personally in high schools. He has also distributed tens of thousands of copies of the Constitution in his district, including one to every high school senior.

But no matter the explanation, I think it is clear that Democrats should not be afraid to stand up to the Republicans and should laugh at their threats.