Dick Cheney: He May Be the Vice President But As For Respected, Liked, And Thought Truthful... Well...

Cheney's protestations of pompous and infinite importance aside, it's sounding like the masses are trying of "Duck, it's Dick!".

From Eugene Robinson's column ("The Ba-Da-Boom Crew") in the Clarksville, TN, Leaf-Chronicle:

If you've been following the Lewis "Scooter" Libby perjury trial, I can understand how you might confuse Dick Cheney with Tony Soprano. Cheney's office is beginning to sound a lot like the Bada Bing, minus the dancers.

Court has been in session only for a week, and already we've heard about characters being set up (Libby, allegedly, to save political wizard Karl Rove), strung along (media bigwigs, who were to be played like patsies), buried in mud (former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the raison d'etre of the Iraq War) and ratted out (the famously leak-averse Cheney, revealed to be willing to leak like a washerless faucet when it suits his purposes).

Cheney's no Tony, though. For one thing, Tony would never let one of his top henchmen go by a preppy-sounding handle like "Scooter." For another, this kind of all-in-the-family mess would send Tony moping to his long-suffering shrink, whereas Cheney shows no inclination to deal with uncomfortable issues or face harsh realities.

Increasingly, the vice president is sounding as if he lives in a la-la land of his own imagining, a place beyond truth.

In Cheney's world, the Iraq War is an enormous success. The idea that anyone would think otherwise is hogwash. The midterm election doesn't seem to have happened yet — some sort of time warp may be involved. Polls that show overwhelming public opposition to the war do not even merit a nod of acknowledgement.

And it's "out of line," as Wolf Blitzer learned, to ask Cheney about a glaring personal contradiction — the administration he serves wants to ban gay marriage, and meanwhile his lesbian daughter and her life partner are having a baby. Cheney acts as if he's willing to go to any lengths to keep people from learning that on the subject of homosexuality, he's probably pretty enlightened.

Let's hope that Cheney isn't really out to lunch, that he's just playing politics. A conservative friend reminded me the other day that all the White House has left, in terms of public support, is the hard-line Republican right. Let's hope Cheney is just tossing out red meat to keep these stalwarts on the team.

And from the American Politics Journal:

Thank you, Dick Cheney.

You have freed us from the bondage of the Sunday morning news programs. We now know, thanks to your brutal honesty, what we have long suspected but only just this week had corroborated. That is, these shows are part of the Big Lie, part of what was once quaintly called the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” (VRWC).

In case you missed it, Cathie Martin, Cheney’s former communications director, admitted on the witness stand at Lewis Libby’s perjury trial that the best way to respond to the accusations that the Bush administration had misled Congress and the nation into going to war with Iraq was to book her boss on Meet the Press. “Chatty” Cathie said that the advantage to doing this is that Cheney would be able to “control the message” (read: lie constantly without being called on it). She admitted, “I suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used. It's our best format.”

It’s our best format.

Indeed.

And why wouldn’t it be? Week after week, it is the same song. Week after week, the symphony of sycophancy is more reliable than Old Faithful at Yellowstone Park. And, like that famous geyser, it’s one prodigious blast of hot air, gas and ashes.
This is, of course, true of all the Sunday morning shows, not just Meet the Press. Thanks to Cheney we know that every one of these shows is involved in mind control.