Liberal Reaction to Failed Taliban Attack on U.S. Vice President: "Better Luck Next Time"

The major news story yesterday was a suicide bomber’s detonation outside the secured perimeter at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, during Vice President Cheney’s visit with military personnel there, but the attack was only half the story. The unabashed disappointment expressed by liberals to the fact that the attack failed was perhaps the aspect that deserves the most attention.

To summarize the incident liberals cheered, the bomb killed at least 23, including one U.S. soldier, one South Korean soldier, and one U.S. contractor. The remaining 20 victims were reportedly Afghani civilians, many of them truck drivers employed to deliver goods to the Bagram base, waiting in line to go through security screening for entry to the base. The bomber did not penetrate security and detonated outside the checkpoint, thus it would appear the Taliban claim that Vice President Cheney was the target of the attack was likely mere political bluster. The U.S. Military put forth the following statement that best describes a plausible motive for the rush by the Taliban to claim the attack targeted the Vice President:

"We actually think that their tying it to the vice president's visit ... was an attempt to draw attention away from the fact that the attack killed so many Afghan civilians, including a 12-year-old boy," said Lt. Col. David Accetta, a U.S. military spokesman.

Attacks at sites where high level U.S. dignitaries are visiting understandably receive extensive international coverage. However, the bombing also served to reveal something very ugly and despicable in American society: personal disdain for a vice president that has become so vitriolic that members of the opposing party are unashamedly disappointed when an alleged assassination attempt of the U.S. Vice President by a foreign enemy fails.

Consider this historical hypothetical comparison which should help place the liberal reactions to the claimed attack on Vice President Cheney quoted below in proper perspective:

It is February 1945, and after 4 years of brutal war in Europe and the Pacific, America has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties fighting a war against ideologies bent on the destruction of America. Vice President Harry Truman decides, at great personal risk, to visit U.S. troops at an air base in the Pacific preparing for a spring offensive against Okinawa. Keeping his intended destination secret, Truman arrives at the Pacific base, greets and dines with soldiers, offering them encouragement and continued support. During Truman’s visit, an enemy combatant approaches a security checkpoint at the Pacific base and detonates a suicide bomb that kills 23 people, including 2 Americans. Truman is taken to a prepared shelter until base security is confirmed, and then, in courageous fashion, continues with his visit and later flies to Manila to meet with a cooperative but somewhat embattled local leader, all while still in mortal danger from further attempts on his life. When news reaches America that the enemy claimed it had attempted to assassinate Truman but failed, many Americans write letters to the editors of local and national newspapers expressing their disappointment that the enemy had not shown more competence and succeeded in “killing Truman over there so we won’t have to do it here.”

Of course, in February 1945, no true American of any party would have harbored such thoughts or wishes against Truman regardless of political persuasion or war opposition (a negligible phenomenon in that war). Yet in today’s supposedly “enlightened” liberal society, disappointment and write-in expressions of anger that Vice President Cheney survived the attack at Bagram were the reactions of such a high number of readers of a highly popular liberal blog, the Huffington Post, that the web site managers were forced to shut down the reader comment thread for an article titled, “Over 20 Die in Attack on Cheney” after reader comments containing wishes that the Vice President had been killed filled 12 pages, as reported by World Net Daily. WND also successfully captured the comments before they were deleted by Huffington Post site managers.

For the record, the Huffington Post acted responsibly by closing the thread and deleting the comments, as they could potentially be a legal liability should some reader determine, based on the shared support of so many fellow readers, that he/she should attempt to do what the Taliban failed to accomplish. Thanks to World Net Daily, we have a representative sample of how personal, irrational, and truly un-American the anti-Cheney (and anti-Bush, which is actually even more acerbic) sentiment in the Democratic Party has become:

Better luck next time! (TDB)

Dr Evil escapes again ... damn. (truthtopower01)

So Cheney is personally responsible for the deaths of 14 innocent people ... and then he waddles off to lunch!! What a piece of sh--! (fantanfanny

Jesus Christ and General Jackson too, can't the Taliban do anything right? They must know we would be so gratefull (sic) to them for such a remarkable achievement. (hankster2)

Hey, Thalia, lighten up. I, for one, don't wish Cheny (sic) had been killed. I wish he had been horribly maimed and had to spend the rest of his life hooked to a respirator. Feel better now? (raisarooney)

Let's see ... they're killing him over there so we don't have to kill him over here? (ncjohn)

And they missed!? Oh, Hell. Like Mamma used to say, I guess it's the thought that counts ... (Anachro1)

You can never find a competent suicide bomber when you need one. Mark701)

Amazingly Democrats wonder why Republicans question their patriotism. As much as Republicans disliked Bill Clinton, hopefully even the liberal left can recognize that impeaching a man for perjury is a lesser level of disdain than wishing that terrorists had killed him while in office. Expressing such wishes verbally or in writing actually constitutes a felony under federal law, hence the Huffington Post’s wise decision to remove such comments from the blog. Republicans were not particularly fond of President Carter, but would have responded with unanimous condemnation and retaliatory force had he been sitting on the reviewing stand with Anwar Sadat when Sadat was assassinated in 1981. The idea of anyone attacking or killing our elected leaders should produce nothing but outrage and a determination to prevent that from happening to any of them, anywhere they may go, in war time or periods of peace.

More disturbing is the realization that many so-called Americans would ever wish for an enemy to determine who holds office by circumventing our democratic process through assassination. We choose our leaders and we should condemn and thwart any effort that takes that choice out of our control.

Many conservatives have argued that liberals are rooting against American success in Iraq and Afghanistan, and expressions of ignorant and inflammatory vitriol, as demonstrated by Huffington Post readers, provide additional evidence that such observations are accurate. Clearly the majority of readers commenting on the incident at Bagram Air Base hate Vice President Cheney on the same level as the Taliban, as they too wished to see him dead.

Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton have declared that Iraq is “Bush’s war,” which has become a phrase used interchangeably with “Iraq War” throughout the liberal media. Framing the war in that manner assures that actually winning in Iraq or defeating terrorists anywhere will hurt Democratic chances in 2008, hence they cannot be expected to do anything to tangibly improve national security or lead to military victory in the Middle East. They simply cannot afford to allow President Bush to succeed in any way, and their personal hatred for the Bush/Cheney team trumps all other instincts, even their own survival. After all, if the Taliban reportedly hoped to kill Vice President Cheney, why would Democrats think they would be immune from such attempts if they were in office?

Terrorists don’t distinguish between our parties and call cease fires on Americans during Democratic administrations. Apparently forgotten are the seizing of our embassy in Tehran in 1979, the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, the bombing of the USSS Cole in 2000, and other attacks during the Carter and Clinton administrations.

The liberal Vice President Cheney haters, in their rabid desire to blame him for everything from global war to global warming, should focus on organizing enough votes to elect a vice president they can support rather than wish radical Islamic terrorists would eliminate a man they failed to defeat politically. Americans should be united in our gratitude that the Vice President was not hurt, not because it was “Dick Cheney, “ or “Darth Cheney,” as liberals like to call him, but simply because he is America’s Vice President, regardless of party affiliation. A phrase the ACLU has not yet litigated against because it contains no God reference, E Pluribus Unum, states perfectly the unity with which America should respond when its leaders are targeted for assassination: Out of many, one.