Cheney Chickens Out

[sabra]

http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/column291.html

CHENEY CHICKENS OUT
By Mike Hudson

A few years ago, President George W. Bush made a surprise Thanksgiving Day trip to Baghdad to have his picture taken helping to serve the troops their turkey dinner. The sight of a chicken carrying a turkey into a roomful of heroes was memorable enough, but the irony became even more delicious a day or two later when it was reported that the turkey had been as fake as Bush's play Army suit.

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Oh yeah, Vice President Dick Cheney. The coward who wheedled five deferments to keep him out of Vietnam and thinks guns are for shooting penned-up pheasants and the occasional trial lawyer made news this Thanksgiving with an alleged trip to Baghdad that allegedly never took place.

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"Cheney visits troops in Iraq for Thanksgiving," it read.

Wow. Maybe he's not such a coward after all, I thought. Things are pretty tough in Baghdad these days, especially on that road -- the "Highway of Death," they call it -- that leads from the airport to the city.

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But you've got to wonder. At what point did reports of the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground prompt our chickenhawk vice president to tap the pilot of Air Force Two on the shoulder and say, "Turn this thing around. I'm not going down there."

At what point, exactly, did Cheney make the executive decision that a picture of him serving up a plastic turkey -- and some video of him telling the troops on the ground how "we're" going to win this thing -- just wasn't worth the possibility of becoming a casualty in a war he largely started.