Red Scare, Updated

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6960-2004Sep8?language=printer

Red Scare, Updated

By Richard Cohen

Thursday, September 9, 2004; Page A27


Let's play a political word-association game. You say "blue" and I say "red." You say "swift" and I say "boat." You say "Cheney" and I say "Welch" and you ask me what in the world do I mean. And I say that when Dick Cheney warned that the election of John Kerry would increase the risk of a terrorist attack, I immediately thought of Joseph Welch, the patrician Boston attorney who confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy back in 1954 and asked, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The answer in McCarthy's case was no. It is no different with Cheney.

Cheney made his remarks Tuesday in a campaign stop in Des Moines, where he elevated the election to a choice not between two men or two parties, but between life and death. "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney said. Somewhere, Joe McCarthy smiled.

Cheney, of course, did not point out that the Sept. 11 attacks occurred on his and George Bush's watch. All of this is in the official record. Also in the record are the warnings of various government officials -- Richard Clarke, for instance -- that Osama bin Laden was almost certainly planning an attack against the United States. Similar warnings from outgoing Clinton administration officials such as Sandy Berger were ignored by an administration that smugly knew better. It was first going to work on missile defense -- the real threat, remember?

In a way, the Des Moines statement is just more Cheney. The vice president is the Chicken Little of the Bush administration, whose dire warnings of this or that never materialize. He insisted, for instance, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, both a scary prospect and reason enough for war. Trouble was, Iraq had dismantled that program, which, as even Bush might fathom, is not the same thing.

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