Much has been written in response to the scary things said by the SecDef Snake on the Nevada plain. But don’t we already know that the only thing to fear is fearful cowards who consider ‘Be Afraid’ to be a strategy instead of a useless state of emotionalism?

What’s been overlooked is that the event was a two-fer. Both of the ex-Nixon reptiles slithered to the convention known for its ongoing romanticism of war.

Among the rat appetizers Cheney was dishing out:

I am happy to report that under the administration of George Bush, we have increased funding for all VA-administered programs by 75 percent. (Applause.) In fact, President Bush presided over a greater increase for the VA in the first four years of his administration than was seen in the entire eight years of the prior administration. In addition, the President’s budget for the next fiscal year calls for $34.3 billion for veterans health care — an amount almost 70 percent greater than the budget when we took office. (Applause.)

And:

As a nation born in revolution — and defended for two centuries by the courage of unselfish men and women — America looks with reverence to our fallen and missing heroes, and to the flag under which they served. Millions of Americans recall the face and the name of someone who never lived to be called a veteran. Departed service members have a special place in our national memory and are taken to their rest with national honors. Recent appearances of protestors at military funerals, mocking the dead and insulting their families in their hour of grief, are an outrage. (Applause.) In response, and with your active support, Congress passed the Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act, and President Bush was pleased to sign it into law.

And then, there’s this:

In just two weeks the calendar will read again September 11th, and our minds will go back to that day five years ago, when enemies struck our country with acts of stealth and murder. The men and women on duty in the War on Terror are serving the highest ideals of the nation — our belief in freedom and justice, equality, and the dignity of the individual. And they are serving the vital security interests of America and the civilized world. There is no denying that the work is difficult and that there is a great deal to be done. Yet we can harbor no illusions about the nature of the enemy we’re fighting, or the ambitions they seek to achieve.

This enemy wears no uniform, has no regard for the rules of warfare, and is unconstrained by any standard of decency or morality. They plot and plan in secret, target the defenseless, and rejoice at the death of innocent, unsuspecting human beings.

This enemy has a set of beliefs — and we saw the expression of those beliefs in the rule of the Taliban. They seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child lives in total obedience to a narrow and hateful ideology. This ideology rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of our society. Such beliefs can be imposed only through force and intimidation, so those who refuse to bow to the tyrants will be brutalized or killed — and no person or group is exempt.

This enemy also has a set of clear objectives. The terrorists want to end all American and Western influence in the Middle East. Their goal in that region is to seize control of a country so they have a base from which to launch attacks and to wage war against governments that do not meet their demands. The terrorists believe that by controlling one country, they will be able to target and overthrow other governments in the region, and ultimately to establish a totalitarian empire that encompasses a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia.

They have made clear, as well, their ultimate ambitions: to arm themselves with chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, to destroy Israel, to intimidate all western countries, and to cause mass death in the United States. Some might look at these ambitions and wave them off as extreme and mad. Well, these ambitions are extreme and they are mad. They are also real, and we must not wave them off. We must take them seriously. We must oppose them. And we must defeat them. (Applause.)

Over the last several decades, Americans have seen how the terrorists pursue their objectives. Something of a pattern developed, and it was plain to see. To put it in blunt terms, the terrorists would hit us, but we did not hit back hard enough. For many years prior to 9/11, we treated terror attacks against Americans as isolated incidents, and answered — if at all — on an ad hoc basis, and never in a systematic way. Even after a strike inside our own country — the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center — there was a tendency to treat terrorist attacks as individual criminal acts, to be handled primarily through law enforcement.

The man who perpetrated that first attack in New York was tracked down, arrested, convicted, and sent off to prison. Yet behind that one man was a growing network with operatives inside and outside the United States, waging war against our country.

For us, that war started on 9/11. For them, it started years before. They killed 241 servicemen in Beirut in 1983. Then there was the first World Trade Center attack in 1993; and after that, the murders at the Saudi Arabian National Guard Training Center in Riyadh in 1995; the simultaneous bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and the attack on the USS Cole 2000. With each attack, the terrorists grew more confident in believing they could strike America without paying a price. So they continued to wage those attacks — making the world less safe and eventually striking here in the homeland on September 11th.

Against this kind of determined, organized, ruthless enemy, America required a new strategy — not merely to prosecute a series of crimes, but to fight and win a global campaign against the terror network. If I may quote Franklin Roosevelt, the President under who many of you served and fought, in words he used to describe fighting the Nazis: “Modern warfare against treacherous enemies,” he said, “is a dirty business. We don’t like it — we didn’t want to get in it — but we are in it and we’re going to fight it with everything we’ve got.” (Applause.)

First, we’re absolutely determined to prevent attacks before they occur, so we’re on the offensive against the terrorists. At home and with coalition partners abroad, we’ve broken up terror cells, tracked down terrorist operatives, and put heavy pressure on their ability to organize and plan attacks. The work is hard, perilous, and ongoing. But we have made tremendous progress against an enemy that dwells in the shadows.

Second, we are determined to deny safe haven to the terrorists. Since the day our country was attacked, we’ve applied the Bush Doctrine: Any person or government that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent, and will be held to account.

Third, we are working to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and to keep those weapons out of the hands of killers. In the post-9/11 world, we have to confront such dangers before they fully materialize. President Bush has put it very well: Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice, in formal declarations — and responding to such enemies only after an attack is not self-defense, it is suicide.

Fourth, we are determined to deny the terrorists control of any nation, which they would use as a home base and staging ground for terrorist attacks on others. That’s why we continue to fight Taliban remnants and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. That’s why we’re working with President Musharraf to oppose and isolate the terrorist element in Pakistan. And that’s why we are fighting with the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime and terrorists in Iraq.

I know some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, we simply stirred up a hornet’s nest. They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway. As President Bush has said, the hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.

The terrorists regard the entire world as their battlefield. That is why al Qaeda has operatives in Iraq today. And they believe they can frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat.

I realize, as well, that some in our own country claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone. But the exact opposite is true. Time and again over the last generation, the terrorists have targeted nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence. In fact such a retreat would convince the terrorists, once again, that free nations will change our policies, forsake our friends, and abandon our interests whenever we are confronted with violence and blackmail. They would simply draw up another set of demands, and instruct Americans to act as they direct or to face other murders. A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists, an invitation to further violence against free nations, and a ruinous blow to the future security of the United States.

He goes on and on with similar blather. (Read it yourself). Highlights include:

Iraq has the most progressive constitution and the strongest democratic mandate in the entire Arab world. Iraq’s political leaders are steady and courageous, and the citizens, police, and soldiers have stepped forward as active participants and guardians of the new democracy — running for office, speaking out, voting by the millions, and sacrificing for the future of their country.

On wiretaps:

To this end, in the days following 9/11, the President authorized the National Security Agency to intercept a certain category of terrorist-linked international communications. On occasion you will hear this called a domestic surveillance program. That’s more than a misnomer; it is a flat-out falsehood. We are talking about international communications, one end of which we believe — or have reason to believe is related to al Qaeda or to terrorist networks. It’s hard to think of any category of information that would be more important to the safety of the United States.

The authorization the President made after September 11th helped address that problem in a manner that is fully consistent under the Constitution and consistent legal authority of the President and with the civil liberties of the American people. The activities conducted under this authorization have helped to detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks against the American people. The recent ruling by a federal judge ordering an end to this program is just dead wrong. We are confident it will be reversed on appeal.

There’s just so much BS in his little speech that I’m too tired to reiterate the details of a rebuttal that utilizes what Cheney despises most - logic. But the ting that struck me most about it is he concluded with a prescription that’s a complete change in course from the failed Bush doctrine!

Liberty and equality; justice and humanity; self-government, tolerance, respect, and the rule of law — these are the principles by which we fight, the principles by which we live, and the principles by which we will prevail.

Stop the presses! This is news!

But I suspect he was just so liquored up that he merely got carried away reminiscing about the way our country used to be.