White House breaks out 9/11 rhetoric over Lieberman loss

I suspect that incumbent Republicans across the nation rejoiced over the story of an apparent airline bombing plot in the UK today. Not because terrorists had been foiled, but because it will serve as an excuse to cut loose with Democrat=terrorist arguments in their reelection bids-- the last few reports of "terrorist plots" here in the US turned out to be more of an embarrassment than anything else.

But who needs an actual threat to make the argument? Tony Snow and Dick Cheney spent yesterday claiming that the primary loss of Joe Lieberman poses a grave danger to US security.

Cheney, during a teleconference he held yesterday, said the following:

The thing that’s partly disturbing about [Lieberman's loss] is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.

And Tony Snow, while careful to point out that he wasn't quoting the president, showed that he got the memo and said this in reference to the eConnecticut primary at a press conference yesterday:

One of the problems that often besets democracies, which is impatience and hard times, in fact serves as a motivation for terror groups. Osama bin Laden some years ago said that one of the keys is that if you simply stay at terror long enough, the West is too weak; he said the Americans were too weak and would stand down. (. . .)

Number three, another consequence would be that it would inflict incredible damage on America's credibility. We have made it clear and this president has made it clear that we are in it to make sure that the people of Iraq do in fact have the opportunity to live free and in a democracy. And to walk away from that vow would send not only a sign of weakness but also of American unreliability, and it would enable forces of oppression and totalitarianism to rise again within Iraq and elsewhere. A white flag, in short, means a white flag in the war on terror.

Now that some 60% of the public have turned against the war in Iraq, it's become more violent and unstable than ever, and we've turned it from a stable, secular (albeit totalitarian) state into an unstable, likely Muslim theocratic state, you'd think the administration would ditch the Soviet-style propaganda in falsely conflating the invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. But they've got elections to win.