Let’s Talk Politics

President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney traded blows yesterday in back-to-back televised speeches.  Speaking at the National Archives, the president restated the need to close Guantanamo Bay while Cheney defended the Bush Administration’s record on national security.

Obama’s speech comes a day after a Congress announced it would withhold the necessary funds to close Guantanamo until the president revealed his plan for relocating the prison’s detainees.  Although the president promised to develop an appropriate legal recourse to deal with those who cannot be tried and are too dangerous to be released, his level of transparency fell short of what legislators–including Democrats–demanded in order to appropriate the requested funds.

After being kept waiting by Obama, Dick Cheney began his speech at the American Enterprise Institute with a bit of dry humor.  He remarked that Obama must have never served in the House because in the House, members are limited to five minute speeches.  Unfortunately for Cheney, Obama’s 10 pages of remarks were eclipsed by his own, which ran 16 pages long.

The former Vice President spoke of his own brainchild:  The Bush-era national security policy.  Cheney called some of Obama’s policies “unwise in the extreme” and vigorously defended the decisions and actions taken by his administration over the last eight years.

Neither speaker proposed anything new.  Instead, America was treated to a bit of “political trench warfare,” in which both men clarified their existing positions.  Still, at the end of the day, it was Cheney who was victorious, not on the basis of his speech, but simply because once the dust settled, the President still lacked the necessary votes needed to accomplish his goal of shutting down Gitmo.

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