Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Someone get Dick Cheney a map

Dick Cheney has two concepts of "Might Makes Right" -- the more standard one, and a more unusual one, pertaining to the fact that the insertion of the word "might" into a sentence makes just about scenario possibly true. Mohammed Atta might have met an Iraqi agent in Prague, Saddam might have been able to make nuclear weapons, those missing high explosives might have been gone before US troops got there, and Osama might not have been in Tora Bora in December 2001:

He [Osama] might have been there [Tora Bora], or in Pakistan, or even Kashmir. ... But it is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad.

And what does Cheney mean with the Kashmir reference? Since he says "Pakistan or Kashmir," does he mean that Osama was actually in India, having crossed one of the most militarised borders in the world? Indeed, having crossed two of the most militarised borders, since Dick also says:

We supported them [Afghan fighters] with tactical leadership and air strikes and the Pakistanis provided as many as 100,000 troops to guard the [Afghan-Pakistan] border.

Either Dick is not paying attention to his spin, or it's just another example of the administration's approach of elevating individual terrorists to superman status -- also evident in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's ability to be in many different places in Iraq at once.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong advocates the explanation, which he has floated before, that Dick Cheney is simply no longer playing with a full deck.

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