Fools for Cheney

Listening to our former vice president defend his administration's actions while attacking those of our current president, I realized I had a very good reason for being skeptical. Dick -- there's an al-Qaida/Saddam Hussein connection, Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, the war will go quickly (in weeks rather than months), we will be greeted as liberators, the insurgency is in its final throes, Iraq oil revenues will pay for reconstruction ... I could go on but there's a word limit to letters and you get the gist of it -- Cheney was wrong on just about everything when he and George W. Bush were first appointed and then elected to lead the country.

Allied with right-wing media water carriers to sway public opinion to their skewed perceptions, Bush and Cheney managed to screw up the Clinton budget surplus, screw up our economy, screw up on catching Osama bin Laden, screw up the implementation of the ill-conceived war they started and screw up America's international moral standing. Now the same right-wing media outlets and personalities praise Mr. Cheney's opinions and seek to validate his claims. We should listen to them again because ... ?

Rather, I say we should heed the advice of an old saying. Remembering the words of George W. Bush: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." And then we should heed the saying the way it's actually supposed to be said, since he screwed that up too.

RON PEDERSEN JR.
North Versailles