Yay, A New Post!

It's possible Cheney remains a stalwart defender of conservative principle to cover for his activities leading the Dick Cheney Executive Assassination Squad. Shhhh, it's a secret.

My friends, I am just as dismayed as you at the utter GLUT of news that has continued to pile up day by day by day since November 4th, and am as overwhelmed as you are. I don't intend to stop blogging, but I surely can't cover it all - please refer to Moonbattery, Newsbusters, The Rottweiler, and various other blogs on my roll to keep up with all the happenings, all right? I am only one person, I'm busy, and I am looking to become even busier. But here's one that interested me.

Why IS Dick Cheney so chatty all of a sudden?

Off the top of my head I can think of many reasons. For one, he's finally free of the constraints of actually having to make decisions regarding national security without being a camera whore, he is finally free of the constraints of having wackos trying to handcuff him on stage (ok, so that was Rove) and screaming "BuCheneyHitler!" at him (well, ok, maybe not) every time he shows his face, and last but not least, our new administration has decided to release sensitive and important national security documents and lessen our national security - security which Cheney has worked really fucking hard to build up for the last 8 years or so. I might "chat" a little myself. I might start to defend myself for once as well, waking up and realizing "Wow, it's not all up to me anymore...but the new guy sure is fucking it up - I better speak up now."

One of the main differences between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, was that right away you knew you weren't going to be seeing these guys on television all. the. fucking. time. They weren't big camera whores, they weren't going on Leno, they weren't doing endless photo ops, holding hands and shaking babies world without end. After 8 years of IN-YOUR-FACE, we had some peace and quiet, and we could, within limits, ignore Washington. Contrary to leftist opinion, this is a positive thing. As far as national security, I had some confidence that these people actually did have the best interests of the country at heart, DID intend to keep the US safe and free, and I felt that on that particular score at least, I had reason for confidence - reason to say, "SOME things just have to be secret. It's the nature of the beast." You don't, for example, go blabbing the location of secret Pakistani ally bases helping combat terrorism to the world at large (cough-Pelosi-cough).

With the advent of the new-style hopey changey chop suey, all that changed. This was not just going to be a transparent administration (well...transparent about certain things and not others - certainly transparent about the prior administration!) it became clear that we were once again under the leadership of megalomaniac narcissists who intended each and every day in each and every way to be IN OUR FACES. It was not going to be possible to ignore them to any degree because they are camera whores the likes of which we haven't seen since Billy-boy and his associates. These people mean to be stars, and stars they are! And in order to detract from their utter incompetence and asininity, one of their tactics has been to expose the secret intelligence of the past administration. It had the opposite of the effect they'd intended, so they're gonna try to make it into a...hehe, well, into a federal case. Tried, of course, in the popular newsmedia. Coolness counts! SWAGGA matters! (I'd like to turn a duck gun on that reporter who compared Obi-wan to Billy Dee Williams and Shaft - this guy is so whitebred, so Don No-Soul-Simmons that the very idea of him having the same kind of "cool" as Billy Dee or Shaft or Dolemite is asinine. He possesses the elite urbanite coolness that is popular with white latte-sipping leftists; not SWAGGA FFS.)

On to their speculation as to why he's talking now. First they describe with breathless pearl-clutching how busy Dick and Liz Cheney's schedules have been. Dickses and Lizzes and schedules, oh my! Those tricksy Cheneys!

Parsing Cheney — code-named Angler by the Secret Service — is a lot like fishing in dark water; there's a lot going on underneath, but you'd never know it from staring at the surface. So let's take Cheney's own stated explanation first. The former Veep says he's worried that by dismantling a controversial Bush-era terrorist surveillance program and stepping back from harsh interrogation policies, the Obama Administration is putting the nation at risk. "I think it's fair to argue," said Cheney, "that we're not going to have the same safeguards we've had for the last eight years."

Man, if I have a secret code name with the Secret Service, I hope it's something awesome like "Angler." Um, I guess it doesn't matter anymore that people know this secret code name? I hope not, since they just reported it. However, that explanation makes perfect sense and I'd say he's understating the case. Emphasis mine to show the editorialization of this article. See, it's not labeled Op/Ed, but it am anyway!

Cheney is clearly troubled both by Obama's rollback of the policies he championed and the buzz on the left that a sitting President might prosecute a predecessor who took those policies too far. Cheney has repeatedly charged the White House with proceeding with prosecutions against the Justice Department lawyers who found the legal basis for the policies and the CIA officers who executed them. But Cheney is reaching: Obama has stopped short of calling for anything more than a probe into the genesis of the Bush-era tactics. True, a probe might well lead to more questions about Cheney's conduct, but Obama has specifically ruled out legal action against the CIA officers.

No, they were satisfied with naming, publishing photos, and telling us where those officers now work. Why prosecute when you can paint a target on their heads instead? Also, who cares where Obama has stopped short? The guy's an incompetent boob so far as the nitty gritty and an evil supergenius insofar as the big picture - he also lies through his teeth. His stopping short now will mean nothing a month from now. Cheney is right to be worried.

Now here's the part that killed me - no need to emphasize anything because it's pure spin and it's...insane.

A more likely explanation is that Cheney, who championed the idea of preemptive-attack doctrine as Vice President, knows that in politics as well the best defense is often a good offense. With the White House decision to release various Bush-era memos on interrogation, and the coming disclosure of thousands more photographs from Abu Ghraib later this month, Cheney is "trying to rewrite history," says a Republican consultant who has experience in intelligence matters. "He knows that as time goes by, he will look worse. And so he's trying to put his stroke on it." (See pictures of the aftershocks of Abu Ghraib.)

Cheney obliquely conceded as much on Sunday, when he told CBS's Bob Scheiffer, "I think it's very, very important that we have a clear understanding that what happened here was an honorable approach to defending the nation, that there was nothing devious or deceitful or dishonest or illegal about what was done." That sounds like: O.K., we got a little out of hand. But we meant well. So how 'bout we just let it go?

He's trying to rewrite history by getting ALL the information OUT? Even the bit that HAS gotten out has done nothing but vindicate him, as well as to demonstrate that he was NOT in fact the prime mover to begin with (Liz Cheney's interview with Norah Dumbass a few posts ago deals with that well). Providing full documentation is REWRITING history? And by what stretch of the imagination is what he said there possibly interpretable as anything remotely like "Let it go, we fucked up"? In fact it says precisely the opposite, just as the documentation so far proves precisely the opposite. How does this idiot read that stuff and say the opposite of what it means - isn't reading comprehension a bare minimum for journalism??? How did this guy make it through school? Also, when did we switch from legal and sanctioned interrogations approved by all the legal committees and the president's men in Guantanamo - where, you know, the waterboarding took place - to Abu Ghraib? Little bait-and-switch? Do they teach that in Journalism 101? Cheney didn't approve or endorse the abuses of Abu Ghraib and you're comparing apples and garden hoses here - liar.

What's quite clear about Cheney's sudden chatty spree is that he wants to refocus the question about waterboarding and other interrogation techniques from whether they were legal to whether they worked. After eight years on the front lines of the war on terrorism, perhaps that is all a man can see. It certainly might explain why Cheney is making such a fuss about asking Obama to release a pair of after-action memos — which he says offer proof that the controversial methods produced evidence that, as Cheney claimed on Sunday, "saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives."

Which is clearly irrelevant. If it saved 6 million lives it would be irrelevant, right? And we already know it was legal, which is why we can move on to the question of what it accomplished. The un-uniformed, un-countried enemy combatants could have been killed where they stood and instead got a resort-like captivity - and if they didn't spill the goods we knew they had, they got a caterpillar or a walling. 2 of them got legally waterboarded and hundreds of thousands of Americans were saved. Cry me a fucking river.

A far darker explanation for the spring offensive isn't about the past but the future. Obama officials have spied something like a set-up in Cheney's latest gambit. One of the Bush team's biggest talking points in its final days in office was an insistence that its greatest accomplishment was preventing a second attack in the years after Sept. 11. By laying down the charge now that Obama has made the country less safe, the Bush team may be able to point fingers of blame if a second attack ever comes.

Irrelevant. For the next 30 years the left will blame Bush (unless someone else comes along they hate more) and the rest of us already know who is deliberately weakening us and setting us up for another attack. The message of the Bush years was that you may build democracies in the ME (wow...that's really amazing actually) but until you've built *only* democracies in the ME you can't let your guard down for a second. Our guard is being not just let down, but THROWN down with reckless abandon. Cheney's got no reason to go on a tour to set up the possible future repercussions here - he's not that vapid nor that stupid. He knows we aren't either. Hell, Biden himself told us right out that this man was going to be tested within 6 months and that it was going to look like they did exactly the wrong thing, right? Blame Biden, then.

Then they say something about maybe salvaging his reputation - I mean, yeah, I would want to as well if I were this guy. He got one fuck of a bad rap.

Cheney briefly ran for President in 1996, and though he is unlikely to make that mistake again, he may see a chance to boost his dismal approval ratings at least within the battered ranks of the GOP.

Yeah, he already has. Not sure why you care, but when your buddy released those memos Cheney's approvability shot up like a rocket. And the speaking he has been engaging in has had the same effect as well. It might have been nice if he'd done it during his tenure, but he had a damn country to run, and what good would it have done anyway?

In any case, Cheney's reappearance has delighted Democrats — "Bring it on!" quipped a White House official on Tuesday afternoon, when asked about Cheney's re-emergence

God, they're stupid.

— and dismayed Republicans. Said one: "We're trying to turn the page, and he's climbing out of the grave to haunt us."

Holy mixed metaphors, Batman! Must have been Meghan McCain. Some RINO; who cares?