Cheney says hopes of world rest on U.S.

AP on Yahoo ^ | 9/19/06 | Tom Raum - ap

[NormsRevenge]

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney cast the global war on terror on Tuesday as a "war of nerves," borrowing a phrase Harry Truman used to describe the Cold War. Cheney asserted that the hopes of the civilized world depend on a U.S. victory.

"We are not going to let down our guard," Cheney told a convention of automobile dealers. He said President Bush "will not relent in the effort to track the enemies of the United States with every legitimate tool at his command."

He defended the administration's warrantless wiretapping and detainee programs, both subject to criticism from Democrats and some members of his own Republican party.

Cheney characterized as "just plain wrong" a federal judge's ruling earlier this month rejecting the administration's plea to throw out a lawsuit over the wiretapping program. "We hope it will be reversed on appeal," the vice president said.

U.S. District Judge Garr King in Portland, Ore., said he was not persuaded by the administration's argument that going ahead with the case would harm national security. It was the latest of several differing rulings on a program the administration says is essential to fight terrorism, but that civil-liberties groups decry as an overreaching of presidential authority.

Cheney said that, to President Truman, the term Cold War was "an expression he never much cared for and seldom used. He called it the war of nerves. When you think about it, that's an apt description of the kind of challenge America is now facing."

"The war on terror is a test of our strength, a test of our capabilities, and above all a test of our character," Cheney said.

"We know that the hopes of the civilized world ride with us. Our cause is right, it is just and this nation will prevail," Cheney added.

Speaking to the National Automobile Dealers Association, Cheney suggested that the U.S. economy was firing on all cylinders and seldom has been stronger. He credited Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and urged Congress to finish work on making them permanent.

Cheney told the dealers that modern automobiles are "marvels of design, performance and reliability. ... You're part of the reason America remains among the strongest economies in the world."

Cheney recalled that his own first car was a 1949 Chevrolet with several hundred thousand miles on it "which I drove with not much skill but plenty of enthusiasm. It had a lot of power. As I could recall, I could pretty much pass anything on the road expect filling stations."

[NormsRevenge]

Vice President Dick Cheney talks about the U.S. economy during an address before the National Automobile Dealers Association in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2006 calling the labor market the 'best in American history'. Cheney credited Bush administration tax cuts on dividends and capital gains for creating new wealth to boost business investment despite this being a bad-news year for GM, Ford and Chrysler. President Bush and leaders of the Big Three auto makers plan to meet after the November election to discuss the crisis in the U.S. auto industry. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

[NormsRevenge]

Vice President Dick Cheney's limousine passes by the peace protest of Concepcion Picciotto as she continues her 24- hour-a-day peace vigil against nuclear weapons, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2006, in Lafayette Park across from the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

[RexBeach]

Good for the Veep. He's a good troop.

You know, it sure is frustrating, if you take this terrorism problem seriously(I do). If the US leads this fight, and we do, then the rest of the world gets angry with us. If we had stayed home and did nothing, then the rest of the world would have accused us of goldbricking.

So, VP Cheney is quite right: The hope of the civilized world rides on our shoulders.

[Musketball Barbossa]

Yar, 'tis true. Thee rest o' the world tis made up of yellow-bellied bildge rats!

(Sept. 19 – “Talk Like a Pirate Day”)

[MattinNJ]

No offense to Dubya, but I still wish we could have flipped the ticket. Cheney is simply magnificent.

[DoctorMichael]

The World's Last, Best Hope BUMP!

[EQAndyBuzz]

Can someone just confirm that King was appointed to the 9th by Clinton.

[DoctorMichael]

Contact for info:

Hon. Garr King
Judicial Assistant: Pamela Cooney
Courtroom Deputy: Mary Austad
(503) 326-8230
(503) 326-8034

.....or try Googling the info.

[Cobra64]

There are so many rimes that if I were W, I'd just issue an Executive Order kicking the UN out of the US, seal our borders, eliminate international trade, bring all our troops home and tell the World to go fukc off.

Then I'd go to Crawford and take a real vacation. No interruptions unless he needed access to the football carrier.

[petercooper]

Bigtime is great.

Cheney/Ashcroft '08

[exit82]

This protestor across from the White House--how did they allow an open-ended 24/7 protest permit ?

[EDINVA]

why doesn't Concepcion go protest in Tehran ?

[demkicker]

I love this man. If only all Americans could listen to him....

[EQAndyBuzz]

I was searching to find out if Clinton appointed King to the 9th when I ran across this article from 2001:

"Ann Coulter

Keep your laws off my Judiciary!

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- AS PART of the ongoing war preparations for the next Big One -- the battle over the courts -- liberals have been denouncing President Bush for injecting politics into the process. They insist they oppose his court nominees across the board, actual and potential, because Bush is engaging in "ideological politics" with the judicial selection process.


Thus, The New York Times recently ran an article by a Stanford history professor plaintively pleading for an independent judiciary, asking: "(W)hat happens to that concept when the appointments process becomes an extension of ideological politics by judicial means?"


Apparently, the way to stop politicizing the courts is for conservatives not to interfere with liberals politicizing the courts. Roll over and let liberals keep their invented "constitutional rights." These include the constitutional right to privacy (the right to stick a fork in a baby's head), the Flynt Amendment (prohibiting all speech except that which is pornographic, blasphemous or criminal conduct), and the historic separation of church and state (requiring that religion be stamped out of the schools, the courts, the public square and the churches).


The problem with the professor's argument is that it's not "the appointments process" that uses "judicial means" to engage in ideological politics. Only the judiciary can use "judicial means" to do anything. The appointments process is just the appointments process. The way to keep politics out of the courts is to keep politics out of the courts. A good start would be for judges to issue rulings grounded in the Constitution rather than the latest ACLU circular.


Here is how some of Bill Clinton's judicial appointments avoided politicizing the courts by closely following the language of the Constitution.


Judge Diane Wood, the centrist judge Clinton put on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, found that failure to provide a prisoner with a smoke-free environment constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Another centrist Clinton choice, Judge Robert Henry of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals held that it was cruel and unusual punishment for the state to deny sex-change hormone treatment for a transsexual prisoner.


Before Clinton promoted him to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, District Court Judge Richard Paez struck down a law against aggressive panhandling at ATMs, outdoor cafes and other specified public places. Los Angeles had passed the law after a man was stabbed to death when he refused to give a beggar 25 cents. Under the ordinance, violators were to be given a formal warning, then a fine. Only third offenses would rank as so much as a misdemeanor. Judge Paez ruled that the law was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech in violation of the Flynt Amendment.


As a sitting federal judge, Judge Paez denounced Proposition 187, the California initiative that barred illegal aliens from receiving state-funded benefits, calling it "discrimination and hostility" against the "Latino community." Paez evidently uses "Latino community" as a synonym for "welfare queens." He also denounced Proposition 209, the California anti-discrimination initiative that tracks the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, calling it an "anti-civil rights initiative."


Another Clinton centrist, Judge M. Blane Michael on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, has concluded that judging employees on the basis of "performance" constitutes discrimination. That's really true.


In response to feminist squawking at Virginia Commonwealth University -- a school with no history of gender discrimination -- the university ran a regression analysis proving that female faculty were paid less than male faculty. To reach this result, the analysis had to exclude merit as a factor in the analysis (e.g., number of scholarly papers published, years teaching since earning Ph.D.). Only by excluding merit did an "unexplainable" gap miraculously appear between female and male faculty's salaries.


VCU responded to the injustice by awarding an across-the-board pay raise to all women faculty -- including at the school of nursing where there were no male faculty members who could possibly have been gypping the women all those years.


Male professors at VCU sued the school for gender discrimination and, not surprisingly, won. But Clinton centrist Judge Michael dissented from the 4th Circuit's opinion on the grounds that even IF the salaries could be justified on the basis of performance, "the only appropriate conclusion to be drawn is that performance factors improperly favor one sex over the other." Merit is a male concept.


Another Clinton centrist appointment was A. Richard Caputo, whose principal qualification was being the father of Hillary Clinton's press secretary, Lisa Caputo. Given the competition, he is surely no worse than the average Clinton appointee. But after all the shrieking about how eliminating the ABA from the process would lead to "patronage" appointments of lesser-quality judges, it is worth noting that Caputo was noticeably less qualified than the average appeals court nominee.

Good thing the ABA was involved in the process. Otherwise judicial selection might have been political. "

[demkicker]

Thanks, that's one of Ann's best. Lots of telling information in that one about Clinton's judicial appointments and why we cannot dare let the beast near the White House to continue stacking our courts with enemies of the state.

[GretchenM]

Way to go, Mr. Cheney:

"We know that the hopes of the civilized world ride with us. Our cause is right, it is just and this nation will prevail," Cheney said.

Cheney recalled that his own first car was a 1949 Chevrolet with several hundred thousand miles on it "which I drove with not much skill but plenty of enthusiasm. It had a lot of power. As I could recall, I could pretty much pass anything on the road expect filling stations."

[Hound of the Baskervilles]

"If the US leads this fight, and we do, then the rest of the world gets angry with us. If we had stayed home and did nothing, then the rest of the world would have accused us of goldbricking. "

Cheney is right but wrong. The free world wants us to take the lead. But paradoxically they are so afraid of everything and so PC that they sway in the wind and won't follow.

Lawrence Eagleburger was on FOX just now. He was beside himself about Chirac taking the sanctions auction off the table. He said we have to understand that with allies like France it is very difficult for Bush to take the lead. He said that he thinks Bush is in a box for now and has no choice but to fall back to negotiations because our "allies" are so weak and perfidious. But he said he thinks Bush is still totally committed to not letting Iran get the bomb and will be forced to act alone.