Former Vice-President and grimacing cyborg, Dick Cheney, has once again made news with his unrelentingly pessimistic vision for America. Emerging from his bunker in an undisclosed location in order to raise money for his new SuperPAC, Cheney joined the Curvy Couch Potatoes on Fox & Friends to elaborate on a foreboding prediction issued last night on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program:

Cheney: “I think there will be another attack. And the next time, it’s likely to be far deadlier than the last one.”

Uh oh. How many thousands of victims does Cheney foresee in his apocalyptic prophecy? How many towering infernos will crumble to the ground? And how imminent is this catastrophe? Well, if the past is any indicator of the future, America can breathe a sigh of relief, because Cheney has been predicting doom for many years with a profound measure of inaccuracy. His unfulfilled prognostications escalated after the election to the presidency of an African-American, Muslim, socialist from Kenya, back in 2008. Cheney was met on the couch by the stupendously imbecilic Steve Doocy who seems to think that the terrorists are targeting Fox News:

“And your worry is even though that what’s going on with Iraq is way over there that they bring it here because a lot of those people, the terrorists, have American passports. You know, in a couple of months one of them could be walking in front of our building with some sort of gizmo to wreak havoc.”

Shameless self-promotion…
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Gadzooks! Al Qaeda has acquired havoc-wreaking Gizmos that they plan to detonate in front of the Fox News building. Impeach Obama! Where Doocy got the idea that there are terrorists in Iraq with American passports he never bothered to say. It’s just another one of those dangling fear-sicles that Fox deploys to keep their audience in a constant state of the shivers.

The problem with Cheney’s misfortune-telling is that it is a thinly veiled message to America’s enemies. And Cheney might be the first to agree if he weren’t a lying scumbag with ulterior motives aimed at defaming liberals and fattening his wallet. Recall that it was Cheney who said that…

“Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness.”

While intended as a swipe at the newly inaugurated President Obama, that peculiar remark was actually a de facto admission that Al Qaeda perceived weakness in the Bush administration nine months after it had assumed power and, thus, took it as an invitation to attack on 9/11. Cheney has spent the last six years exploiting every opportunity to disparage America’s defenses. He was joined in this pursuit by what I called “The Republican Advance Team For Terrorism.” The question is “Why?” As I wrote in that 2009 article…

If you were a terrorist, what would you make of all of this talk? Would it embolden you? Would you view it as an invitation? What point are Republicans trying to make? If they really believe that America’s defenses are weakening, is there a strategic purpose to broadcasting that to our enemies? […] How does announcing to the terrorists that they believe our nation is becoming weaker make us safer? Do they even care? Are they just pasting a big bulls eye on America and hoping for an “I told you so” moment?

It remains true today that Cheney’s public maligning of the ability of the United States to ward off its enemies is irresponsible in the extreme. It reflects a not-so-latent desire to inspire the very sort of attack that he is pretending to warn against. His own words regarding “the perception of weakness” affirm his intentions. Cheney is virtually advertising that America’s guard is down so now would be good time to attack. And even though he’s wrong, the consequences could still be disastrous, because even an aborted terrorist attack could produce casualties.

If Cheney and his associates at Fox News really cared about this country, they wouldn’t be openly soliciting harm. So that tells us all we need to know about their pseudo-patriotism.