The creepy relative who won’t leave after his visit, the Gadfly General, just keeps chipping away at the Obama Administration on the issue of our safety and security.  Talking heads keep harping on him, and wonder his motivation, separate and apart from the substance of his claims.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney just won’t let go of the issue, let alone go away.  His persistence certainly suggests he believes truly what he is saying, but his credibility on the subject is based almost entirely on the fact there has been no further act of terrorism on our soil since September of 2001.

We’ve seen he was wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  He was wrong about our military victory being greeted with ticker tape parades in Bagdad.  He was wrong about troop levels and strategies during the war.  He was wrong in raising the spector of mushroom clouds over American soil.  Every public reason he gave for going to war has been proved wrong.

It strains credulity for any reasonable person to believe meaningful and actionable intelligence was gleaned from anyone who was or had to be “waterboarded” dozens of times.  Yet, he continues to espouse its use as a means of protecting our country.  He sneers and snarls and raises his lip in defense of former President George W. Bush as having “basically” approved the use of torture to extract information from Gitmo prisoners, this from a man who chooses his words so very carefully.

That careful choice of words, in turn, raises further questions about his motivations in pressing on with his attacks.  Putting those motivations into play, in turn, challenges the correctness of his assertions that our country is weakened and more vulnerable to a future attack as a result of President Obama’s policies.

It was generally acknowledged during the Bush years that another attack against the US was inevitable at some point in the future.  That it did not happen before those years ended, Cheney claims, was a direct result of his husbanding of America.

Yet, the extent to which this was merely a coincidence of timing can not be measured.  As Eugene Robinson correctly points out in his Washington Post column today, Cheney can’t prove that any anti-terrorism methods within the laws of our nation would have had success in preventing that next attack, and nor can Cheney prove that the use of torture was particuarly effective.

The former vice president apparently believes rather strongly that history will vindicate all of his actions; or, perhaps more correctly, that his persistent insistence will successfully influence the way history judges him.  Perhaps, though, his motivation is more short-term in those hopes – - everything to do with what should be established as criminal acts sanctioned by his office, things that were “basically” approved by former President Bush on Cheney’s advice.

We’re just ordinary folk out here, struggling to make ends meet, keep or find jobs, hold on to our homes, feed our kids, pay our bills, and hope our country continues to be safe.  We want our troops home from a war we should never have fought, a war that has taken over 4,000 of our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters.  We want to believe things will get better in our lives.

Who do we believe?  Who do we listen to?  Cheney’s former boss has had the good sense to remain above the din and dinner circuit chatter of the gadfly.  When former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell, a man certainly more well-versed in war than Cheney, suggests views contrary to his own,  the gadfly dismisses him as not being a Republican anyway.

And as if that didn’t make him suspect enough, he is given the imprimatur of Limbaugh The Entertainer as the “one, lone voice” of the Republican party.  After that, who really needs to be convinced the guy’s just a buffoon?

Bottom line, though . . . it has to be more than kool aid for the gadfly.  There’s more at play here, and that makes everything he says suspect.