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Peggy Noonan: "Ignorance keeps you perky."
...On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of "perhaps hundreds of thousands" of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. "I think there is a high probability of such an attempt," he said.When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, "I don't see how anyone can think that's not true." I told her I'm certain it is true. And it didn't seem to me any of the half dozen others there found the content of Cheney's message surprising. They got a grim or preoccupied look. The question for the Obama administration: Do they think Mr. Cheney is essentially correct, that bad men are coming with evil and deadly intent, but that America can afford to, must for moral reasons, change its stance regarding interrogation and detention of terrorists? Or, deep down, do the president and those around him think Mr. Cheney is wrong, that people who make such warnings are hyping the threat for political purposes? And, therefore, that interrogation techniques, etc., can of course be relaxed? I don't know the precise answer to this question. Do they know exactly what they think? Or are they reading raw threat files each day trying to figure out what they think? The bad thing about new political eras is that everyone within them has to learn everything for the first time. Every new president starts out fresh, in part because he doesn't know what he doesn't know. Ignorance keeps you perky.... Posted by: Mike 2009-02-06 |
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