was a one-off event, coordinated, devastating but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. but in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half measures keep you half exposed. and on the day after president obama told the country osama bin laden had been captured and killed, actually killed, abc s jonathan carl interviewed cheney. let s listen. are we safer now? i think so, but it s a kind of situation where we need to preserve our sense of vigilance, if you will. we need to stay just as vigilant as we have been. let me go back to david. i mean, this is an important transition from cheney-ism to obama-ism. obama s fighting the war because we have to fight it because it s something we can handle and also be americans at the same time. cheney saw it as an all encompassing reality he stepped into and wasn t actually upset with being in. he seemed to be at home in it.
under bush/cheney, especially cheney, the country was forced into a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed neither a strategic nor an existential threat to us, a war cheney justified as if it did. we were on a war footing. that was the national mindset the neocons and fellow hawks knew they could justify everything from torture, to war, to propaganda, manufactured, of course, in the vice president s office as well. remember that? the aluminum tubes? the notion that saddam hussein had a mysterious airplane that would deliver nuclear bombs on america. dick cheney sold the notion of an unending orwellian war on terrorism as if it were a country somewhere, a country called terrorism when much of what he accomplished from putting troops in saudi arabia, to fighting an unjustified war in iraq, to waterer boarding did less to subdue terrorism than it did to give our enemies pictures and causes for war. well, obama is acting to fix that, putting the terrorism threat w
secondly, he has properly put forward the obama doctrine which is a shift to the counterterrorism doctrine. to be very specific, not nation building. we re focusing our efforts on nation building here at home. chris, you know why that s important? look what happened last night in the state of washington. a bridge collapsed. look what happened 5 1/2 years ago in minnesota. a bridge collapsed and 13 people were killed in minnesota. there are 75,000 bridges that are structurally deficient in our country. are we waiting for your kids or my kids to be killed? it s time to start nation building here at home. start bringing the troops home from afghanistan. refocus our efforts on the true threats but most importantly on nation building here at home. and not continuing this military industrial complexion that bush and cheney started. well said. thanks for coming on. patrick murphy, couldn t agree with you more. david corn, thank you, sir.
like that. the idea there would be bombs dropped with nuclear bombs. the idea we d be facing 9/11s every weekend. this was out of proportion to what we faced. of course it led to such excesses of waterboarding and torture. you know, i think the comment you just played from the aei speech which was eight years or so after 9/11 in which he said there are no half measure, all or nothing, shows the mindset. the world doesn t tend to work in all or nothing terms. i think what the president was doing yesterday, i liked the word you used at the beginning, chris, was putting this in perspective. everything in life is often a balancing act. you could have we could go even further on security measures at airports and elsewhere than we have gone so far if you want to try to have more security. but we have to balance that against freedom and liberties and civil liberties. and cheney was basically arguing apt at aei, you go all out or it
my kids to be killed? it s time to start nation building here at home. start bringing the troops home from afghanistan. refocus our efforts on the true threats but most importantly on nation building here at home. and not continuing this military industrial complexion that bush and cheney started. well said. thanks for coming on. patrick murphy, couldn t agree with you more. david corn, thank you, sir. coming up, where is the irs scandal going from here? big question, actually. open question. the official overseeing the mess had been removed from duty. the acting director has been forced to resign. are the critics left now with anything more than their conspiracy theories? plus when he couldn t sell his tooty fruity ice cream, he offered to fight any in the house for $1. he refuses to join his fellow republicans. also why one republican congressman, has ronald reagan to thank for him becoming president.