Lynne Cheney is out on the TV trail promoting her new book Blue Skies, New Fences. It has nothing to do with politics as far as I know but she's still being asked political questions. Without fail, she's given the same comment about 9/11 which I assume qualifies it as a talking point. Whether she came up with it on her own or it's been fed to her by White House officials, I don't know. To paraphrase, she basically says that after 9/11, we thought it would be 6 months, or even 6 weeks, before the next terrorist attack and therefore Bush and Cheney deserve credit for 6 years since the last attack. Jon Stewart was smart enough to make the obvious point, well it was 8 years between the 93 bombing and 9/11. That cut off the strength of her initial point, one that many others have gotten away with. She responded that there were other smaller attacks on the US like the USS Cole and Embassy bombings. Stewart didn't pursue it any further. Perhaps someone should remind Lynne Cheney that Americans are attacked all the time now. They're just soldiers not civilians. I guess that's what they mean when they say fight them over there so they won't come here. It really means "We're going to take our young men and women in uniform and throw them into the Middle East as easy targets for terrorists so the terrorists can kill them instead of having the difficult task of pulling off an attack in the US." If you count the lives of American soldiers as equivalent to the lives of American citizens, we've essentially had more than another 9/11 since 2001. Too bad it appears that those 3700+ soldiers' lives haven't actually decreased the likelihood of a future terrorist attack. We've yet to hear any real information about whether any terrorist attack attempts have been stopped due to our increased vigilance and policies or if they would have been stopped anyway; that would be a better measure of whether Bush and Cheney deserve credit. Otherwise, we're just incurring civil liberty cost, human cost, and monetary cost for nothing.