So Tom Ridge is taking issue with Dick Cheney's assertion that President Obama has made the country less safe.
Interesting. Ridge seems to be joining Colin Powell as the increasingly assertive voice of moderate Republicanism.
I remember the term "waving the bloody shirt" from high school history -- the tendency of northern politicans to evoke the Civil War for decades after that conflict in an attempt to gain moral leverage over their southern counterparts.
It seems to me that there was a lot of waving the bloody shirt for much of this decade, but the blood was from the Sept. 11 attacks. Anyone who didn't support the Bush administration's particular brand of hawkishness on the foreign or domestic front was a squishy-soft pacifist, wallowing in self delusion as terrorists plotted their next strike.
But it seems difficult to credibly make that accusation against the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the first director of homeland security. Maybe it's me, but I can't picture either of those guys hanging out with Joan Baez, sitting around a campifire and singing "If I Had a Hammer."
