Cassandra was a mythical figure in Greek mythology- a favored priestess of the god Apollo, she resided in the city of Troy, in the temple of Apollo, where she could foretell the future to all who requested an audience. She fell out of favor with the god Apollo, because she would not submit to his amorous advances.
When that happened, Apollo cursed her , that she could foretell the future, but that no one would believe her ever again. As it happened, the Greeks had a little spat with the Trojans, recounted in the Iliad, by the Greek author Homer, and in this fight, which supposedly lasted twenty years, Cassandra made prediction after prediction, but no one believed.
At the end of the war, after twenty years had passed, the Greeks were tired, and resorted to trickery. They built a giant horse, into which went their best warriors, hidden. The rest of the armada pretended to sail away, and the trojans, awakening and seeing the giant horse, and no Greeks, came to the conclusion that they had won, and the horse was an offering to the Gods, or the Trojans (it’s unclear really who was the true intended recipient), and a peaceful offering.
Over Cassandra’s vocal protests that this horse meant doom for all Trojans, the horse was wheeled into the Walled city of Troy, and at night, during the celebrating, the hidden Greeks slipped out and, with the other Greeks who had come back under cover of darkness, killed all within Troy, or so it is written.
Former vice President Dick Cheney is the Cassandra of today’s world- he talks of terrorism (and yes, Virginia, it IS still called terrorism) that came to our shores and of terrorism that still yearns to make us very dead. He speaks from experience, experience that Skinny B and his posse DO NOT HAVE in dealing with terrorists, as evidenced by the rampant backpedaling B has had to do in the Gitmo “closings”.
“Nine-eleven caused everyone to take a serious second look at threats that had been gathering for a while, and enemies whose plans were getting bolder and more sophisticated. Throughout the 90s, America had responded to these attacks, if at all, on an ad hoc basis. The first attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a law enforcement problem, with everything handled after the fact – crime scene, arrests, indictments, convictions, prison sentences, case closed.
That’s how it seemed from a law enforcement perspective, at least – but for the terrorists the case was not closed. For them, it was another offensive strike in their ongoing war against the United States. And it turned their minds to even harder strikes with higher casualties. Nine-eleven made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat – what the Congress called “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” From that moment forward, instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count up the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place.” Weekly Standard
As counterpoint to Skinny B’s watery speech, in which he prevaricated about the terror situation, and preferred his favorite childish tactic, which was pointing to the Bush administration twenty- eight times either by name or by implication, Dick Cheney didn’t truly criticize the present administration, instead, plainly making the case of why our vigilance can not be relaxed.
“Everyone expected a follow-on attack, and our job was to stop it. We didn’t know what was coming next, but everything we did know in that autumn of 2001 looked bad. This was the world in which al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear technology, and A. Q. Khan was selling nuclear technology on the black market. We had the anthrax attack from an unknown source. We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.
These are just a few of the problems we had on our hands. And foremost on our minds was the prospect of the very worst coming to pass – a 9/11 with nuclear weapons.” Weekly Standard
It is no accident that Dick Cheney’s popularity is growing as more and more people are becoming uneasy with this know- nothing poseur in the White House, and his crew of blame-the-victim liberals spending all their time trying to minimize any reference to terror. Calling something a “man caused disaster” will not make the deaths any less horrible, and deleting the term “terrorist”, or “enemy combatant” from our vocabulary will not cause them to either like us more, or kill us less.
“So we’re left to draw one of two conclusions – and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked, and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event – coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years, and of the policies necessary to protect America for years to come.
The key to any strategy is accurate intelligence, and skilled professionals to get that information in time to use it. In seeking to guard this nation against the threat of catastrophic violence, our Administration gave intelligence officers the tools and lawful authority they needed to gain vital information. We didn’t invent that authority. It is drawn from Article Two of the Constitution. And it was given specificity by the Congress after 9/11, in a Joint Resolution authorizing “all necessary and appropriate force” to protect the American people.” Weekly Standard
If you note the first sentence in that second paragraph, you will begin to see the problem we now have vis-a-vis this current administration, as all the Liberal socialists there seem hell- bent on castrating our intelligence services, beginning with the Speaker of the House, but not limited to her alone.
Perhaps, if everyone listened to Dick Cheney a little more, and Skinny B a little less, then the similarity between Cheney and Cassandra would end at having the same first letter in their names, rather than their shared voices in the wilderness.
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