The cynicism of Dick Chaney

Vice President Dick Cheney has been so wrong so often that the standard for his credibility is in the basement. (Do you remember his saying that the insurgency was "in the last throws" or that Iraqi people would "welcome us" or that the Iraqui oil revenues would pay for the war, which would be over in a couple of months?)

He recently made a speech in Alabama in which he repeated the party line. Lets take a look at his logic and reasoning.

"It's time," he said, "the self-appointed strategists on Capitol Hill understood a very simple concept: You cannot win a war if you tell the enemy when you're going to quit."

Three things are wrong this with surefire applause line. First, the congressional Democrats are raising issues of policy, not strategy. In other words, they're acting not like "self-appointed strategists" but rather like popularly elected lawmakers.

Second, who is this "enemy" that Cheney says the timetable would be tipping off? If it's al-Qaida and the other terrorist groups in Iraq, he and Bush know very well that the House and Senate proposals allow U.S. troops involved in counterterrorism to stay in Iraq indefinitely. (The bills also exempt from withdrawal those troops involved in training Iraqi security forces, as well as those protecting and supplying U.S. workers, officials, and military personnel.)

Third, what is this business about winning the war? Does Cheney think we can win? And how is he defining the term? Even General Petraeus says we cannot win militarily.

Mr. Chaney is, at best, a cynical old fool.