Full Speed Ahead, Says The Titanic Captain

Why in God's name would you put Dick Cheney out in front of independent voters the Sunday before the election, knowing that he'd say something like "the public be damned" regarding the most important issue to the electorate?

Four days before the election, as Republican candidates are battling to save their seats in Congress amidst a backlash over the war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News the administration is going "full speed ahead" with its policy.

"We've got the basic strategy right," Cheney told George Stephanopoulos in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on "This Week." [...]

Cheney said that even with pollsters predicting Democrats will likely make gains in both houses of Congress on Tuesday, voter sentiment would not influence Bush's Iraq policy.

"It may not be popular with the public — it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing," Cheney said. "We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right."

What this actually shows is that the Cheney Administration is prepared to not accept the role of an oppositional Congress as legitimate, and that they would simply dismiss anything a Democratic-controlled Congress does. The next two years could make Watergate look like The Era of Good Feelings.

My favorite part of this sneak preview, however, is Cheney's reaction to his neocon buddies deserting the sinking ship in an article for Vanity Fair, with stab-you-in-the-back paragraphs like this:

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

Cheney's reaction to such disloyalty? All together now...

Cheney said, "I haven't seen the piece I'm not going to comment on it. I think there is no question that it is a tough war but it is also the right thing to do," he said. "And it is very important that we complete the mission."

As usual, any time discouraging information comes to light, Dick Cheney hasn't seen it.