David Brooks Joins Those Trying to Unseat Rush Limbaugh and Richard Cheney from Their Positions at the Head of the Republican Party
However if Brooks wants to get anywhere he is going to have to work much harder and to find a different frame for his anti-Cheney and anti-Limbaugh columns than Obama is a liar":
Cheney Lost to Bush: [A]fter Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy.... The Bush people...did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive. The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years.... But that period ended long ago.
By 2005, what you might call the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun. Gradually, in fits and starts, a series of Bush administration officials — including Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Jack Goldsmith and John Bellinger — tried to rein in the excesses of the Bush-Cheney period. They didn’t win every fight, and they were prodded by court decisions and public outrage, but the gradual evolution of policy was clear....
Throughout the second Bush term, officials were trying to close Guantánamo, pleading with foreign governments to take some prisoners, begging senators to allow the transfer of prisoners onto American soil.... [T]he practice of waterboarding... [was halted by] a succession of C.I.A. directors starting in March 2003, even before a devastating report by the C.I.A. inspector general in 2004....
When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he is... attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public... the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way...
