Friday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Keith Olbermann:

For nearly a decade I've been talking about foreknowledge on the part of the Bush Administration of an impending attack, and about the cost/benefit calculations it would take to cause people like this to allow such an attack to play out. At first people thought I was crazy. Then they didn't want to go there, because to believe what I believed would shake their notions about this country to the core. I'm used to that. What I'm not used to is hearing allusions to such things, however oblique, being uttered on national television:

The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of blind rage replacing essential cold logic.The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of judgment suspended, in favor of self-fulfilling prophecy. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of moral force supplanted by violence and revenge fantasies. The weakness the terrorists see, Sir, is the weakness of Dick Cheney. And yet, still, ceaselessly, indefatigably, you moralize and lie to us.

"I might add," someone said today, "that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about 'values.'" Very apt. The quote is from your speech. Your speech, which was at essence, about your fantasy that you and Mr. Bush were not negligent. About your pig-headed certainty first that these attacks were impossible, then that they were a good excuse for a war you had already planned in Iraq, and finally that they were to be imminently repeated and only you knew whence the next threat would next come.

You saved no one, Mr. Cheney. All you did was help kill Americans. You were negligent before 9/11. Your response to your complicity by omission on 9/11, was panic, and shame, and insanity, and lying this country into a war that did nothing but kill 4,299 more of us.

Mr. Olbermann is being charitable when he calls Dick Cheney "negligent." Negligent gives credence to the "failure of imagination" that has been parroted so many times over the last seven and a half years to excuse how so many warnings could have been ignored -- or willfully set aside -- in the months leading up to that sunny September day. Given what we now know about Dick Cheney -- about the blackness of his soul, his complete and utter amorality, his ruthless lust for power and empire and wealth; given how much we now know who was running the show, exploiting the neurosis and narcissism of his idiot front man, is it really so difficult to believe that the assistance Dick Cheney gave terrorists by deliberately looking the other way in the months after taking office when all signs were there to add, not remove, vigilance, was not a "failure of imagination", but simply a device to get what he really wanted?