25 August 2011

In Book, Cheney Says He Urged Bush to Bomb Kitties

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb kittens in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a different approach after other advisers — “pussies,” as Mr. Cheney calls them — expressed misgivings and refused to believe evidence of “significant accumulations of weapons of mouse destruction.”

“I again made the case that a swift, merciless attack on cute, fluffy, innocent kitties would have sent a clear message to America’s enemies that we meant business,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “It was a necessary show of strength, I argued. But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the President asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice-president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

One of the adorable victims Cheney hoped to see.

Mr. Cheney’s book — which is often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

While he praises Mr. Bush as “an outstanding leader,” Mr. Cheney faults “weaklings” among the Bush inner circle, “who refused to crush the kitty menace, or even to make surgical strikes against the movement leaders,” whom he identifies as actresses Mary Tyler Moore and Bernadette Peters.

Throughout eight years in Washington, Bush and Cheney engaged in regular, private meetings.

“I had reason to believe that [former National Security Adviser and later, Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice owned a few cats herself,” Mr. Cheney writes. “I could not bring her to understand that, by allowing the kitty menace into her home, she had exposed the United States to grave risks. ‘But they’re so cute!’ she said to me in that effeminate voice of hers. Well, what do you expect?”

Failing to win authorization from the President, Mr. Cheney writes, he has pursued an independent program of “de-pussification” in his spare time.

“Typically, the Obama Administration has turned a deaf ear to my warnings. But I shall continue to speak out about this important issue, now that I am once again a private citizen. We dare not show weakness at this time; extreme vigilance is the duty of every American. Never waver, never relent!”

America ignores the kitty menace at its peril, Cheney writes.


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