Cheney Berates Democrats On War

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Washington Post
April 14, 2007
Pg. 7

Policies Attacked as 'Far-Left Platform' of McGovern Era
By Peter Baker, Washington Post Staff Writer
CHICAGO, April 13 -- Vice President Cheney accused congressional Democrats today of reviving the "far-left platform" of George McGovern from the 1970s, an agenda that he said would raise taxes, declare surrender in an overseas war and leave the United States exposed to new dangers.
In a sharp-edged speech, Cheney escalated the Bush administration attack on Congress for passing war spending legislation that would mandate withdrawing at least some U.S. troops from Iraq. He raised the specter of the end of the Vietnam era, when McGovern, then a Democratic senator from South Dakota, ran for president on a peace platform and lost the 1972 election in a landslide to President Richard M. Nixon.
"That was the last time the national Democratic Party took a hard left turn," Cheney told a conference hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation. "But in 2007, it looks like history is repeating itself. Today, on some of the most critical issues facing the country, the new Democratic majority resembles nothing so much as that old party of the early 1970s."
Cheney asserted that Democrats want to impose "the largest tax increase in American history" and have already "earned a place in the big-spending hall of fame." Their support for pulling out of Iraq, he said, suggests they do not "fully appreciate the nature of the danger this country faces in the war on terror" and have given in to "the far left wing" with actions that "have moved from the merely inconsistent to the irresponsible."
The red-meat attack represented part of a broader effort to bring back into the fold a Republican base that in recent years has grown increasingly disenchanted with President Bush over his leadership of the war and his administration's spending policies. Cheney sought to redirect attention against a common enemy for conservatives by drawing parallels to McGovern, a figure who tends to unite the right against the left.
But with the public behind their plan to pull out of Iraq by next year, according to opinion polls, congressional Democrats tried to turn the rhetoric of the past back at Cheney. "It's interesting that the vice president would make a reference to the 1970s because, just like Nixon, President Bush is isolated and hunkered down in the White House while his administration is under investigation and top officials are withholding key evidence," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.).
Reid was a favorite target for Cheney as the vice president took aim at a number of prominent Democrats by name, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), former vice president Al Gore, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and party chairman Howard Dean. He mocked Pelosi for visiting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Reid for initially refusing to meet with Bush on the war spending bill.
"When Nancy Pelosi flies nearly 6,000 miles to meet with the president of Syria but Harry Reid hesitates to drive a mile and a half to meet with the president of the United States, there's a serious problem in the leadership of the Democratic Party," Cheney said. Reid and Pelosi eventually agreed this week to meet with Bush at the White House next week. Pelosi has defended her trip to Syria, and Democrats have accused the White House of hypocrisy for not denouncing prominent Republicans who have also visited Damascus.
Cheney noted that Reid has changed his position on Iraq in recent months -- from forswearing any move to cut off war funding after the November election to embracing legislation mandating withdrawal to supporting another bill to flatly end spending on the war. "Three positions in five months on the most important foreign policy question facing our country and our troops," Cheney said. He added: "Americans are entitled to question whether the endlessly shifting positions he and others are taking are reflections of principle or partisanship and blind opposition to the president."
Still, for all the tough lines in the speech, Cheney evidently decided to pass on some of the toughest. In his prepared remarks, he was to denounce Democrats as "the McGovernite Party" but when he spoke he dropped that term and referred to it instead as "that old party."
Likewise, the prepared text had him mocking Reid for claiming the American people support the Democrats' war spending bill. Noting various pork items inserted into the bill, Cheney's text had him saying: "Harry Reid may be the only man in America who thinks we need to spend millions of dollars fighting crickets in Nevada in order to win a war in Iraq." But when he delivered the speech, Cheney skipped over that paragraph.
 
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