Mr. Cheney Goes To Washington

Does anyone remember when the Vice President criss crossed over the entire country in 2000 stating that he and President Bush would restore integrity to the White House?? The Vice President is not tarnishing the office with sexual excapades at 1600 Pennsylvania but he is doing damage to the office based upon the way he has characterized his involvement in Halliburton, Energy Policy, and now Iraq.

To watch his most recent performance on Meet The Press one would get the idea that winning elections is more important than performance on the job. His ability to look calmly into the camera with a montone voice and lie is scary!!

Here is what Frank Rich wrote on Sunday:
You’d think that after having been caught concocting the scenario that took the nation to war in Iraq, the White House would mind the facts now. But this administration understands our culture all too well. This is a country where a cable news network (MSNBC) offers in-depth journalism about one of its anchors (Tucker Carlson) losing a prime-time dance contest and where conspiracy nuts have created a cottage industry of books and DVD’s by arguing that hijacked jets did not cause 9/11 and that the 9/11 commission was a cover-up. (The fictionalized “Path to 9/11,” supposedly based on the commission’s report, only advanced the nuts’ case.) If you’re a White House stuck in a quagmire in an election year, what’s the percentage in starting to tell the truth now? It’s better to game the system.

The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job. Maybe that’s why I am beginning to find Dick Cheney almost refreshing. As we saw on “Meet the Press” last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he’s about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word context, as in “the context in which I made that statement last year.” The vice president invoked “context” to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its “last throes.”

The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase “I haven’t read the story.” He told Tim Russert he hadn’t read The Washington Post’s front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone “stone cold” or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report(PDF) contradicting the White House’s prewar hype about nonexistent links between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Nor had he read a Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was “no evidence of resumed nuclear activities” in Iraq. “I haven’t looked at it; I’d have to go back and look at it again,” he said, however nonsensically. Can you imagine the former Vice President Al Gore or President Clinton getting away with these responses or sidestepping questions like this?? If we live in a world where there is a "liberal media bias" than we can also contend that there is a "conservative media bias". Either way the average American is left craving for a meaningful discussion on the Iraq war. We are also left with a government that unfortunately has created a citizenry which is very skeptical of any information that it communicates to the public.