Steal This Meme: Cheney’s War on Terror Ended Long Ago Because it Didn’t Work

Somehow I missed Jack Goldsmith's Times piece explaining that Cheney's War on Terror policies were ultimately counterproductive even for the purposes of bolstering executive power. In it he cites both Bush and Rumsfeld expressing regrets for taking Cheney's advice to secretly and unilaterally create CT policy.

Cheney, of course, is "'not inclined to make any mea culpas."

As Goldsmith writes:

"He has instead deflected the failures of his philosophy by maintaining that Barack Obama embraced his policies. Obama did continue many of the Bush administration counterterrorism policies as they stood in January 2009. But the 2009 policies Obama inherited were not Cheney policies. They were the products of a four-year pushback against those policies..."

After the killing of al-Awlaki, Cheney and his daughter stepped up to the mic to demand an apology from Obama. Their logic: Obama had criticized some of their policies, but was also using some of their other policies (sort of). And that's not fair.

John McCain responds with readily apparent exasperation to a question about whether Obama owes Cheney or Bush an apology: "About what?" He also notes that the so-called 'enhanced' interrogation program netted no valuable information.