In an unusually direct and aggressive blog post, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer today criticizes former Vice President Dick Cheney for his constant critique of the administration’s national security policies.
Pfeiffer wrote, “it is telling that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the Administration than condemning the attackers.”
Pfeiffer said that in his statement to Politico today Cheney makes a “clearly untrue” claim that Obama doesn’t realize we’re at war.
“I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama,” Pfeiffer wrote, detailing the times Obama and his top advisers have used the term.
“The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we [are] at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered,” he wrote.
Another key graf:
To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.
“Unfortunately too many are engaged in the typical Washington game of pointing fingers and making political hay, instead of working together to find solutions to make our country safer,” he wrote.
Pfeiffer also defended Obama’s policies as a big shift from when the U.S. was focused on Iraq for seven years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Read the full blog here.
