Speaking of Being a Total Dick

Will Bunch at Attytood discusses the growing paranoia of Duck! It's Dick! Cheney:

There's a lot for the blogosphere to buzz about tonight, and into that mix comes a fairly explosive profile of Dick Cheney in the new Vanity Fair, written by Todd Purdum. The headline grabbing stuff is going to be the comments by the vice president and his daughter Mary on how the family learned she was gay and their acceptance of it. We don't know what to make of all that -- maybe we're reluctant to comment because we remember John Kerry making an idiot of himself on the subject in 2004.

And truthfully, that's not what's important here. Just the short excepts that we've seen will confirm your worst fears, that the man who steered us into Iraq and is now pushing us toward Iran, and possibly a nuclear war there, is a raving victim of paranoia.

Read it and weep:

Purdum reports that Cheney travels with a chemical-biological suit at all times. When he gave his friend Robin West and his twin children a ride to the White House a couple of years ago, West commented on the fact that Cheney’s motorcade varied its daily path. “And he said, ‘Yeah, we take different routes so that “The Jackal” can’t get me,’” West tells Purdum. “And then there was this big duffel bag in the middle of the backseat, and I said, ‘What’s that? It’s not very roomy in here.’ And [Cheney] said, ‘No, because it’s a chemical-biological suit,’ and he looked at it and said, ‘Robin, there’s only one. You lose.’”

This is scary stuff, indeed. For those of you under 40ish, "The Day of the Jackal" was a Frederick Forsyth thriller, made into a 1973 movie, that follows an assassin's attempt to kill Charles DeGaulle (Spoiler alert: He misses...duh). For some men, four heart attacks might trigger a kind of fatalism, but the Cheney effect seems to be the reverse, an over-the-top survivalist instinct -- no doubt worsened by his many months brooding in "undisclosed locations" -- and the growing belief that people are out to get him on every street corner.