Dick The Talking Head

Cheney links Iraq violence to US poll:

"Whether it's al-Qaeda or the other elements that are active in Iraq, they are betting on the proposition they can break the will of the American people," Cheney told Fox News.

"... They're very sensitive to the fact that we've got an election scheduled." ...

Cheney said America's enemies in Iraq possessed the internet savvy to monitor US developments, helping them to time attacks aimed in part at influencing the elections. But he cited no evidence to back the theory.

"There isn't anything that's on the internet that's not accessible to them. They're on it all the time. They're very sophisticated users of it," he told Fox's Neil Cavuto program.

Of course, this month's high levels of US deaths are on a par with the general increase in violence over the past six months or more, and relate particularly to the failed "Together Forward" effort to suppress Baghdad insurgents. Furthermore, casualties have tended to increase every year during Ramadan.

And let's not forget that many Iraqis are only getting six hours of electricity per day, at best.

Spinning Iraqi suffering for partisan political purposes is just disgraceful. But the War in Iraq has always been a war of domestic propaganda, waged on TV screens and newspaper pages from coast to coast, aimed squarely at the citizens of Bush's USA.

Maybe Cheney should read Frank Rich's latest column, Dying to Save the G.O.P. Congress:

The ultimate chutzpah is that Mr. Bush, the man who sold us Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds and “Mission Accomplished,” is trivializing the chaos in Iraq as propaganda. The enemy’s “sophisticated” strategy, he said in last weekend’s radio address, is to distribute “images of violence” to television networks, Web sites and journalists to “demoralize our country.”

This is a morally repugnant argument. The “images of violence” from Iraq are not fake — like, say, the fiction our government manufactured about the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman or the upbeat news stories the Pentagon spends millions of dollars planting in Iraqi newspapers today. These images of violence are real. Americans really are dying at the fastest pace in at least a year, and Iraqis in the greatest numbers to date. To imply that this carnage is magnified by the news media, whether the American press or Al Jazeera, is to belittle the gravity of the escalated bloodshed and to duck accountability for the mismanagement of the war.

Vote the bums out.