Vice President Dick Cheney used an appearance this morning in eastern Iowa to attack comments democratic presidential candidate John Kerry made about terrorists. In an interview published Sunday, Kerry said he hopes to lead the U-S “back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they’re a nuisance.” Cheney calls Kerry’s view naive, and the Vice President says Americans need to understand that terrorists want to attack the United States and are trying to acquire deadly weapons to use against us. “Unless you get your mind around that concept and come to grips with that, it’s difficult to adopt or understand the strategy that’s necessary in order to protect the United States against that kind of an attack,” Cheney said in Davenport. Cheney accuses Kerry of holding a dangerous “pre-9/11″ mindset, and the Vice President, as he has before, blamed the Clinton Administration for failing to a fully address the threat terrorists posed to the U.S.”They (terrorists) learned those two unfortunate lessons: one, they could strike us with impunity because they did repeatedly; secondly, that they could change our policy if they hit us hard enough,” Cheney said. Cheney pledged that Bush would stay the course on the war on terror if he’s re-elected. “We’ve got a President…who has a proven track record out there,” Cheney said. “He is not a man who makes a decision lightly and then changes it because the polls don’t look good.” Cheney also defended President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. “Based on all the information that we had, I’m convinced the President did exactly the right thing and looking back on it now with everythingl we know today, the world is a whale of a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail and we did the right thing by taking him down and taking his government down,” Cheney said, as the invited audience applauded. Cheney held a roundtable discussion early this morning at “The Thunder Bay Grill” in Davenport. The protesters weren’t far behind Cheney this morning. A Kerry campaign aide came to give Cheney a pink slip. That Kerry aide, Joe Householder, has taken a brief leave of abscence from Senator Hillary Clinton’s staff to work for Kerry. Householder also worked on Governor Tom Vilsack’s 2002 re-election campaign.
