Dick Cheney: A Creepy Metaphor Machine:
Oh, what metaphors abound for Dick Cheney's interview with Wolf "Behold the Resplendent Glory of My Silvery Stubble" Blitzer on CNN's Situation Room yesterday. Yes, the slithering tentacles of evil that manipulate the willing puppet body of the Vice President hunched him into a seat to answer questions without spewing viscous black oil from his dessicated entrails or unhinging his jaw to swallow whole the CNN host to slowly digest later in the quiet of his rotting corpse-filled underworld sanctuary. With a nice single malt and cigar.

For instance, we could compare Cheney's initial appearance and reactions to the surfacing of that frilled shark in Japan this week. Other than behind its heaving gills (for, indeed, it was dying, nay, rotting from within), the fishy beast, which has been around since prehistoric times, has no real color, existing in the netherest of nether regions in the deep ocean. Shifting eel-like in his seat, Cheney rasped to Blitzer, "The fact of the matter is, we can do more than one thing at a time and we have. We've been very successful with going after al Qaeda. They're still out there, they're still a formidable force. But they're not nearly as formidable as they once were, in terms of numbers and so forth...We have successfully defended the country for over five years against any further attack. They've tried, we know, repeatedly -- the president talked about it last night in his speech." The shark, as we know, died soon after it was captured. Cheney, though, kept going in the interview, so let's try another metaphor. Another shark metaphor.

In Australia, diver Eric Nerhus was being eaten head first by a great white shark. Imagine that for a moment - your head, shoulders, upper torso being swallowed as the shark tries to engorge the rest of you, the blinking dark and light of the mouth opening and closing, trying to saw you in bits, or at least in half for easier consumption. Yes, you know if you're diving off the coast of Australia, you're gonna get in the water with sharks. Nerhus used his only free arm (for the other one was in the shark) and jabbed the eye of the great white, which, sharks notoriously being pussies about their eyes, opened its mouth, giving him time to swim away.

So it was that Blitzer, in Cheney's office, tried to confront the Vice President, repeatedly. Attempting to pin down Cheney on the administration's role in destabilizing Iraq and plunging the region into its inevitable conflagration, Blitzer asked, "How much responsibility do you have, though -- you and the administration -- for this potential scenario?" Trying to hold Dick Cheney, though, is like trying to hold down a slug. Blitzer, wanting to avoid being swallowed whole, said that Saddam Hussein had been contained. Cheney, chewing hard, gurgled, "He was not being contained. He was not being contained, Wolf. Wolf, the entire sanctions regime had been undermined by Saddam Hussein," before dismissing Blitzer with "You can go back and argue the whole thing all over again, Wolf, but what we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do." Blitzer fought like a son of a bitch, eventually extricating himself and getting out of the water, because, as those who swim with man-eating fish beasts know, the shark always comes back to where the blood is. Or it just swims off, knowing it'll eat again soon.

Cheney stuck a shiv into Blitzer, repeatedly, if we think about the bearded one as our proto-citizen questioning the powerful. He questioned Blitzer's objectivity, he said that if Americans "don't have the stomach for the fight. That's the biggest threat," he dismissed half of America by saying that the reason Hillary Clinton wouldn't be a good President is "Because she's a Democrat," he told Congress it can go fuck itself, and, when Blitzer attempted to engage Cheney on the wackoid religious right's reaction to his muff-diver daughter's pregnancy, he became the outraged father, saying, "You're out of line with that question." By that point, though, any attempt to appear human, beyond his fleshy form, was long past worthless.

It was a disturbing twenty-minutes, filled with an unending stream of revulsion and disgust, not unlike catching your roommate masturbating to pornographic images of severe burn victims. And, at the end, we learned that Dick Cheney's contempt for Congress, the American people, and the Constitution is boundless, like the roots of depravity that tie him to the earth and feed his barely beating "heart."

Note: The Rude Pundit is thinking about another metaphor. See, in the film Pan's Labyrinth, there's a being that's called (in the credits) the Pale Man. (Suppose this oughta say "Spoiler Alert," although if you've seen a damn preview, you've seen the dude.) Bald with saggy skin, blind except for eyes that rest on a plate in front of him, the Pale Man sits still and silent at the head of a table that holds a sumptuous banquet. Our adolescent heroine, Ofelia, has been warned not to eat anything. She looks up at paintings in the large chamber and sees that the Pale Man is portrayed as skewering and eating children, as clear a warning as anything can be. Ofelia is too tempted though, and she downs two grapes. This awakens the Pale Man, who inserts the eyes into his hands and he rises, dragging his thin legs and limping towards Ofelia, who doesn't notice the Pale Man coming towards her. Who is Ofelia? Blitzer? All of us? Either way, a pissed-off Cheney thinking someone's taking his shit is not to be fucked with.

Note II: Any time she wants, the Rude Pundit will throw down with Maureen Dowd over who comes up with the coolest pop culture references to describe the political landscape. C'mon, MoDo, let's boogie.