Note: This is a repost and slight revision of a blog originally posted in September of 2012 on my website (DaveElder.com) back when the website had a blog page, before the March 2013 redesign.
Back when Dick Cheney explained his 1% solution, in which he said he would choose to interpret a 1% threat to the national security of the United States as equal to a 100% threat, he as much as admitted that he didn't have enough brain cells firing at any one time to be able to distinguish between a 1% threat and a 100% one. You would expect a leader focused on national security to weigh each potential threat based upon how it really tips the scales, determine which threats merit greater attention, and then set strategic priorities based upon that determination. Skewing your priorities to make a 1% threat equal to a 100% threat could lead to disastrous ends, such as invading a country that poses no actual threat to your own, based upon false evidence or faulty interpretations of intelligence, resulting in trillions of dollars of new debt on top of unnecessary widespread death and destruction.
After all, what kind of crazy paranoid fool carries around a hazmat suit in the trunk of his car, worried that terrorists could strike at any moment? The same kind of fool who could believe that Saddam Hussein played an active role in the 9/11 attacks, even though logic and a clear understanding of the facts would dictate otherwise. Like many others, I noticed the Orwellian way in which Bush and Cheney often linked Iraq and 9/11 in their speeches, when no such link actually existed, or even could have existed, but in their minds such a link did exist. Mr. C had to admit in a post-administration talk that he never found that missing link, even though while in office he did his best to have such a link tortured out of the mouths of various prisoners.
From a 2012 book entitled 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by New York Times contributor Kurt Eichenwald, we learned that not only did Bush and Cheney ignore repeated warnings about an imminent Al-Qaeda attack within the United States, but some in their administration floated the idea that Osama Bin-Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack on the U.S. for the purpose of distracting the administration from the very real threat (in their minds) posed by Saddam. While such an idea made no logical sense, it appealed to the simplistic thinking of a group of people who can only understand the world in terms of "us versus them." Sadam and Osama, in reality, never worked together, and never would have done so, but Cheney, Bush and the rest of their neocon cabal could never understand that. When presented with a strategic offer from the leadership of Iran, Cheney responded by saying, "We don't talk to evil." What kind of leader uses such a phrase? One who can only comprehend the world by reducing its complexity to the simplest and most blunt terms, and such a leader will almost always mislead.
Remember back in March of 2003 when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a live press conference and broadcast network audience that he knew the location of Iraq's non-existent WMDs? Looking closely at those non-existent WMDs now, they bear a striking resemblance to the super-secret Soviet ABMs which The Committee for the Present Danger, run by Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, worked very hard to protect us from back in the late 1970s and up through much of the 1980s. When the fall of the Soviet Union proved conclusively that no such Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile program had ever existed, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney almost immediately found new enemies to fear.
Over the past few years, right-wingers have vowed to keep us safe from the imposition of Sharia Law, the enforcement of martial law by U.N. troops, and the threat posed by hidden members of the Muslim Brotherhood inside of various security-related departments of the executive branch. The echoes of McCarthyism in the Muslim Brotherhood accusations are astounding indeed, but to be fair to Mr. McCarthy, while there were no Communists in the executive branch of his time, contrary to his loud and forceful assertions, the likelihood of there being one was still much greater than the possibility of a member of the Muslim Brotherhood lurking within the present day executive branch. As far removed from reality as right-wingers like McCarthy were in the 1950s, the modern-day heirs to their paranoia have moved a step or two further away from reality.
I had thought that, given their incredible mishandling of security matters related to 9/11 as well as other significant events such as the anthrax attacks (which were never solved) and violations of D.C. air space by small private aircraft, the Bush/Cheney bunch would forever put an end to the myth of Republican superiority in matters of national security, but yet that myth still persists in some quarters. Why? Because right-wingers believe that only other right-wingers can keep them safe from the hobgoblins that haunt their simplistic worlds. Those of us who live in the reality-based community, with its thousands of shades of gray as well as millions of colors, cannot afford to have these clowns handling our national security, because not only will they not see where the next major threat might come from, if it's substantially different from the last one, but they will also drag us into more wars against people and countries that pose no actual threat to us, but who are different enough from us that these right-wingers will see in them some possibility of a 1% threat to the United States, and that possibility will then become 100% to them because they cannot actually tell the difference between the two numbers. The only way to achieve genuine, effective and lasting national security is to keep these right-wing fools, and the hobgoblins that haunt their simplistic minds, as far away from our national security apparatus as possible.
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