Durbin Says Cheney Out Of Touch With Reality

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Assistant Democratic Leader in the Senate, reacted to Vice President Dick Cheney's CNN appearance on Wednesday by describing Cheney as seriously out of touch with reality.

Durbin was responding to a Cheney interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer in which Cheney claimed that "we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes" in the Iraq war.

"Earlier this morning, I said that he was delusional when it came to this issue," said Durbin. "To be delusional is to be out of touch with reality. And I believe the Vice President has been out of touch with reality when he makes comments such as that."

Here's more from Durbin on the Senate floor yesterday:

It is interesting that the Vice President would make this statement barely a week after the President of the United States announced that we are facing a slow failure in Iraq. The President sees a slow failure; the Vice President sees enormous successes.

This is not the first time the Vice President has made statements which defy reality. We can all recall the statements made by him and many others in the administration suggesting the presence of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, suggesting a connection somehow between Saddam Hussein and the tragedy of 9/11. It turns out that in each and every instance the Vice President was wrong.

We can also remember that in June of 2005 when we were facing one of the bloodiest, deadliest periods in Iraq, Vice President Cheney said:

"The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in their last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Another quote from the Vice President which was not in touch with the reality of the war in Iraq.

We have had that from the beginning. Whether it was the Vice President's suggestion--this comes from March 16, 2003:

"Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."

The point I am making is this: If the current Secretary of Defense concedes to our Armed Services Committee that we are not winning this war, if the Baker-Hamilton bipartisan study group comes forward and says the situation is grave and deteriorating, if the President says our continued course of action is a slow failure, one has to wonder where the Vice President is receiving his information.

You can read the rest of Durbin's floor speech in the Congressional Record here.