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Somewhere, Rudy Giuliani is blushing: Dick Cheney referenced September 11 25 times in his speech this morning. “It's almost as if Cheney just grabbed a couple of copies of the Weekly Standard from January and pasted them together,” Steve Benen writes at Washington Monthly. Particularly egregious was Cheney’s attack on his critics for using “euphemisms that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy.” Benen asks, “Since when does Cheney find ‘euphemisms’ so offensive? We are, after all, talking about the leader of an administration that came up with some doozies in the euphemism department. … Cheney probably thought it would raise his stature to speak after the president on the same subject. The strategy was half-successful—he got the media to characterize this as some kind of showdown between relative equals. But the other half was a humiliating failure—Cheney came across as a small, petty man, trying a little too hard to undermine the nation's elected leadership while salvaging some shred of personal credibility.”