anotherlook

Like a bad penny Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin just keep turning up. Neither can seem to stay away from the news media. Recently, CIA Director Leon Panetta stated that Cheney seems to be “wishing that this country would be attacked again in order to make his point” – his point being that Obama is making the United States less safe than it was under George Bush’s rule.

Personally, I have to wonder why he is so intent on verbalizing this, every chance he gets. Does he really believe this? Is he still attempting to justify his and the Bush Administration’s use of torture as a definitive means of preventing terrorist attacks? Is he, as Panetta suggested, hoping that if he says this enough times, a terrorist attack will happen and he can then sit back and say “see, I told you so”. His behavior is bordering on obsession.

With North Korea threatening war if any of its ships are accosted on the water, the re-election of Ahmadinejad to the office of power in Iran and the intensive fighting that is occurring in Afghanistan and Iraq, it may be just a matter of time anyway before someone tries an attack on United States soil, but would this solely be because of Obama’s words and outstretched hand.

Cheney is citing the words of Obama as well as his deeds of reversing many of Bush’s initiatives, closing Guantánamo Bay and putting a halt to what is called “enhanced interrogation” methods – better known as torture as the leading cause of America becoming less safe because of Obama. Realistically speaking however, the United States is unsafe because of everything else happening in the world.

Earlier this year, Panetta fired a firm run by two psychologists who helped introduce waterboarding and other harsh forms of torture into the interrogation realm. It would seem as though even the CIA was against these outlawed methods of intelligence seeking. So again why is Cheney so verbal on this topic?

While Obama refused to allow Panetta to look into the matter of torture further, maybe, just maybe Obama should have allowed this approach so that charges, that would have stuck, could have been brought against Cheney. As it stands now, Cheney seems to feel empowered, justified, even, in his handling of the torture.

Palin on the other hand is desperate to stay in the consciousness of the American people any way she can. Now while she is charismatic and can inspire a crowd, as she demonstrated last year as McCain’s running mate, she needs to find a more positive forum to be brought into the public eye a forum of intelligence rather than bickering and fashion.

It seems that anyone can goad her into any type of dialogue because she is desperate for the attention. Somehow this does not seem a fitting characteristic to have as leader of a country as “great” as the United States, yet, on some levels she is, so far, the best the Republican Party has brought to the table in terms of energy and verbal skills.

Good or bad, Palin is who people continue to talk about and when the laughter starts, I’m not sure if they are laughing at her or with her – something she needs to evaluate for herself in the coming months.

And that’s the way I see it!!

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