Why Now, Dick?:


Now that it has realized that it can absorb sunlight without ulcerating too quickly, the acidic pollutant-made-flesh known as former Vice President Dick Cheney believes it can appear at will to forcibly spit forth fungal spores into the media atmosphere, parasitically attaching to those who it once spurned, feeding off them to hopefully infect them to make them rot. For, indeed, Dick Cheney is nothing if not an entity that wishes things to collapse from within, like a gutted corpse.

"What is Cheney's game?" the political prognosticators ponder. Why has he appeared now, so very often, to declaim the rightness of his administration's approach to interrogation and war? More than likely, it's just the ruminations of a bitter little man with nothing better to do with his time. But, still, the Rude Pundit's got a couple of other ideas:

It's a Rovean plot to save the Republican party. It's contingent on another terrorist attack happening at some point, but if Cheney is out there telling America that Barack Obama is feeding al-Qaeda a porridge of our tasty civil rights instead of slamming suspects around, then should a mall in Dubuque go up in a mushroom cloud, who's gonna seem like they were never wrong? Or...

It's an ass-saving, investigation poisoning act. Let's say that an investigation into torture authorization (or lying under oath about torture authorization) leads right to him. Cheney's on the record protestations that it wasn't torture and that it saved lives, unchallenged by the media, abrogates any revelations and gets out there his defense. It upends the process of allegation and alibi and, barring any major new information, renders many of the conclusions of an investigation either moot or contradictory.

But mostly, Cheney's interview on CBS's Face the Nation with Vampire Bob was just a clusterfuck of self-aggrandizing and masturbatory impulses, with the former VP yanking it until he exploded cold spooge over Vampire Bob's nation-sized face. For, and here's the deal, if waterboarding did absolutely prevent that Dubuque nuke, then who the fuck cares if it was torture or not? Give someone a fuckin' medal.

Except it didn't. That's why he's scrambling so hard. All Cheney was peddling was the pathetic idea that the United States became so degraded under the watch of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that it was just one pour of the bottle, one detainee slapping away from apocalypse. If the purpose of Cheney's interview schedule is to prop up his legacy, then all he's succeeding in doing is making us see how far down they dragged us.