"We Must Kill All The Terrorists We're Creating"

Mo Dowd, from today's NYT:

Bin Laden has become the Willie Horton of the midterms. After letting the C.I.A. disband the unit devoted to hunting for Osama -- the Senate took a slap at the White House on Thursday when it voted to reinstate it -- Mr. Bush now won't stop talking about the bogeyman he ignored for five years while he transferred all his resources to Iraq.

"The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad," he said.

Instead of going after Osama, we invaded Iraq. Now W. says we must stay in Iraq or it will be run by Osamas. We must kill all the terrorists we are creating. American soldiers must keep dying because American soldiers have died. If we criticize Mr. Bush, then we're unmanning the whole country. The logic is deviously Rovian, and we are trapped in the circularity.

On "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney warned that America cannot let its adversaries "break our will" and show we "don't have the stomach for the fight."

"It was the right thing to do," Vice insisted of the war in Iraq, "and if we had to do it over again we would do exactly the same thing."

After all the miscalculations and billions wasted, projects screwed up, lives and limbs lost, foreign enemies made, American stature squandered, Taliban strength regained, North Korean bombs and Iran-Iraq alliances built (visiting the American-hating, Holocaust-denying Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq called Iran "a good friend and brother") Dick Cheney wouldn't do anything differently?

Part of leadership has to be retooling, saying: "You know what? This hasn't worked. This is making things worse. What else can we do?"

Break out the Wet Wipes, Mr. Cheney. Time for a good scrubbing.

Meanwhile, The Rude One says:

"Don't let Osama Bin Laden tell you how to vote."