Yet another protestation that the Bush administration supports dissent, this time from Dick Cheney:
[Cheney] said he respected the right of Murtha to form his own opinion. Murtha has served in Congress for three decades, is a decorated Marine combat veteran from Vietnam, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee and has long been an ardent defender of the armed forces.
"Nor is there any problem with debating whether the United States and its allies should have liberated Iraq in the first place," Cheney said. "Nobody is saying we should not be having this discussion."
Um, yes they are.
Update 11/22: Last night, RNC chair Ken Mehlman joined in the fun, saluting dissent even as he condemned it as sending "the wrong message" to our troops and the terrorists:
Many Democrats who once agreed with the President about the danger of leaving Saddam Hussein in power now want an investigation.
Maybe this investigation will reveal that they were brainwashed. Or that, like John Kerry, they were for the war before they were against it, for short-term political gain.
Either way, this kind of political doublespeak sends exactly the wrong message to our troops, to the Iraqis and to our terrorist enemies.
Ladies and gentleman, dissent is as old as America. Questioning our leaders is a patriotic act. No one is immune to criticism -- not the President, and not those who are attacking him.
But now they're trying to rewrite history. It is pure politics.
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