13 Rue Madeline

Liberals have launched a stunning new offensive against Dick Cheney and the idea that the United States ought to defend itself.

You have to just shake your head. After 9/11 the United States intelligence community mulled over the idea of assassinating known terrorists. The Bush Administration refused to implement the program and therefore never told Congress about the program that never happened. Democrats are so desperate to pin something on Bush that they now want to bash Cheney for not telling Congress what the president did not do.

Liberals misunderstand the public. We grew up on James Bond and our kids grew up on 24. Most of us assumed we had been doing this all along! The unpleasant shock is that we had not been hunting down and assassinating terrorists at close range, not the non disclosure of a non program.

Just watched a great James Cagney movie from about 1946 called 13 Rue Madeline. It was the story of US intelligence operations in World War II. James Cagney trained a group of operatives to attack Fortress Europe from the inside. He told them that they needed to forget ideas of sportsmanship and fair play. Trickery, lying, and killing at close range were all parts of war. This reflected the assumptions and reality of warfare against Nazi Germany.

At what point did we get so soft that this is considered unacceptable even by hawks?