HARRY SHEARER: As is well known by now, [Dick Cheney] uses the case of the failed Detroit underpants bomb attempt to accuse President Obama of “pretending that the United States is not at war,” thereby making us less safe. He can engage in this kind of rhetoric safe in two comforting assumptions: that the Republican base, and a certain percentage of independents, will eat this stuff up, and that the Democrats, in and out of power, will continue to not know how to respond. The latter is because they, willingly or not, allowed themselves to be co-opted into the “war on terror” model in the first place, out of fear of being depicted as “soft” if they so much as emitted a peep of opposition. What should they be saying? Dick 
Cheney, and George W. Bush, made the country less safe for eight years by pretending that this country was at war, thereby wasting vast amounts of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, while failing to achieve the basic aims of the enterprise. The problem with pretending we’re at war, rather than understanding we’re dealing with a criminal syndicate — like the Mafia — is that it gets our resources overextended and tied down in geographical areas, like Afghanistan, while the opponent is free to move and relocate (hello, Yemen!, hi, Somalia!). In fact, the war model weakens us, makes us less able to respond nimbly and quietly — check the recent stories on the logistical challenges facing the Afghanistan surge here, here, here and here. In short, we lumber, they scamper. MORE
WHITE HOUSE: 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.