Don’t Hit Me Again!

Vice President Dick Cheney’s outrageous statement that if we elect Kerry, we will be “hit again”. is garnering considerable attention in the Liberal Media, but given considering the mood of the electorate and the public’s habituation to hyperbole, will probabaly we soon swept into the dustbin of campaign retoric and forgotten.

Personally, it makes us want to wail, “Please, Poppy, don’t hit me again! I’ll be good.” However, looking beyond the viscereal gut-reaction, logic and the track record cast additional doubt on the veracity of the prediction.

In Russia they have “elected” the poster-boy for hard-assed, steely-eyed power-politics, and look how that is turning out for them. Having a paranoid, hard-line, hard-hitting authoritarian in power is no guarentee against terror – in fact, it seems to attract bombers like bees to honey.

Don’t forget that 20 years ago Putin was running the KGB, and Bush senior was his counterpart at the CIA. Maybe this whole modern morality play was cooked up in Langley and Dzerzhinsk Square. Spooky, huh?

Another example. Four years ago our friend and partner in the war on terrorism, Israel, elected a hard-line, get tough with the terrorists hawk as prime minister. Has this bold move stopped or even discouraged the terrorists from blowing up Israelis? In fact, the ascension of Sharon marked the beginning of the period of most intense terrorist attacks in the history of Israel.

Do we really want New York City, Boston and Houston turned into Tel-Aviv clones, with cameras and checkpoints on every corner and the nation on a permanent state of alert, waiting for the next suicide bomber?

Maureen Dowd weighs in in today’s New York Times with her own inimicable take on the topic:

“George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have always used the president’s father as a reverse lodestar. In 1992, the senior Mr. Bush wooed the voters with “Message: I care.” So this week, Mr. Cheney wooed the voters with, Message: You die.

The terrible beauty of its simplicity grows on you. It is a sign of the dark, macho, paranoid vice president’s restraint that he didn’t really take it to its emotionally satisfying conclusion: Message: Vote for us or we’ll kill you.”