Weapon of Mass Distraction
I'm getting sick and tired of hearing Sean Hannity (and others in the Republican Noise Machine) whine about all the weapons programs and intelligence funding that Kerry supposedly voted against. (I've seen a blog entry somewhere that accurately debunks this whole mess--I'll find it soon.) Recently, Dick Cheney has been loudly trumpeting this line of attack. Jonathan Baskin and David J. Sirota over at American Prospect report that perhaps Dick is a little two-faced:

Cheney proposed or recommended much of that legislation, and often pushed for cuts far larger than those Kerry voted for. So which man is more of a threat to America: the man who occasionally voted against weapons systems -- or the man who pushed to cut those weapons, bragged about the cuts, and then condemned his opponent for the same votes?

Here are some key points in the article:

Cheney accuses Kerry of calling for “major reductions or outright cancellations of many of our most important weapons systems”; Bush ads attack the senator for voting “against 13 weapons systems for our troops” over 20 years. But it was Defense Secretary Cheney who gloated that he had “put an end to more than 100 systems” in less than three years. In December 1991, he bragged to the Washington Post that he was setting “an all-time record as Defense Secretary for canceling or stopping production” of weapons and equipment.

[...]

In March of this year, Cheney attacked Kerry for having “repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military,” hammering the senator for voting “against the Apache helicopter, against the Tomahawk cruise missile, against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.” He said this record has “given us ample doubts about [Kerry’s] judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security.”

What Cheney leaves out of his stump speeches is the ironic fact that almost all of the cuts Kerry voted for were endorsed or originally proposed by Cheney himself. At issue is not the cuts themselves, but the hypocrisy of Cheney attacking an opponent who merely followed his lead.

[...]

Cheney excoriates Kerry for being “deeply irresponsible” on intelligence issues. As evidence, he cites a proposal in the 1990s by Kerry and Republican Senator Arlen Specter that would have slightly reduced intelligence funding.

First and foremost, Kerry’s proposal was small potatoes compared to GOP efforts to cut intelligence. Bush’s own nominee to head the CIA, Representative Porter Goss, authored legislation that would have slashed 20 percent of the budget for human intelligence two years after the first World Trade Center attack.

But more importantly, Kerry’s proposal was nothing compared to Cheney’s shortsighted effort to stifle intelligence reforms in the name of retaining his own personal power. As the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reports, “Some of the most important intelligence reforms proposed by the 9-11 Commission, including the creation of a Director of National Intelligence (DNI), might have been adopted over a decade ago if not for the opposition of the Secretary of Defense at the time, Dick Cheney.”

Specifically, in a March 1992 letter to Congress, Cheney defended the status quo and objected to legislation that would have taken some of his powers away in order to create a new Director of National Intelligence. In the letter, Cheney wrote that intelligence reforms proposed by Congress "would seriously impair the effectiveness” of government and specifically opposed a “single, national intelligence ‘czar.’”

Cheney went beyond merely giving advice -- he issued threats. He said he would recommend “that the President veto [the measure] if [it] were presented to him in its current form.” The proposal died. As a result of Cheney’s stance, FAS says, “we now face many of the same problems, and the same proposed solutions, more than a decade later.”