After Cheney interupted the normally bipartisan friendly Senate
photography ceremony to say a choice word to a Democratic Senator,
which will get US any media fined up to $500,000 if they broadcast it,
Maureen Dowd had a few choice words.

June 27, 2004 NYTimes
Are They Losing It?
By MAUREEN DOWD

One thing you've got to say for Dick Cheney: No one will ever again
dismiss the vice presidency as a pitcher of warm spit. Mr. Major
League Potty Mouth has shown that, with obsequiousness to the
president and obtuseness to the facts, a vice president can run the
world. Right into the ground.

This week, it's not just Democrats who are questioning whether Vice is
losing it. Now, even some in the White House are saying it's bizarre
that he chose a class photo-op on the Senate floor to suggest that
Senator Patrick Leahy do something that you won't even find described
in Bill Clinton's "My Life."

While Democratic lawmakers delayed final passage of a defense spending
bill so they could mingle with Michael Moore, the once sweat-free
Bushies were acting jangly.

First Vice chewed out The Times for accurately reporting that the 9/11
commission said there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam
and Al Qaeda. Then Paul Wolfowitz called the reporters risking their
lives in Iraq craven rumormongers. Then came Mr. Cheney's F-word. (Not
Fox, the other one.)

Finally, President Bush got agitated when an Irish TV interviewer said
most of the Irish found the world more dangerous now than before the
Iraq invasion. "First of all, most of Europe supported the decision in
Iraq," Mr. Bush declared. (It's all in how you define "Europe.")

Even as Tom Daschle proposed bipartisan family retreats to heal the
harsh mood, even as the Senate passed the "Defense of Decency Act,"
Mr. Cheney profanely laced into Mr. Leahy for criticizing
Halliburton's getting no-bid contracts.

"I felt better afterwards," he told Neil Cavuto during a no-bid
interview with Fox News. Hey, if it feels good, Dick, do it.

He said he had no regrets about his "little floor debate in the United
States Senate." He didn't want to go along with Mr. Leahy's attitude
that "everything's peaches and cream" when the Democrat had just been
jawing about Halliburton war profiteering. Peaches and cream have
never been on the Bush-Cheney menu, only brimstone and gall.

By playing on the insecurities of an inexperienced leader, Mr. Cheney
has managed to change W. from a sunny, open, bipartisan,
uniter-not-a-divider, non-nation-builder into a crabby, secretive,
partisan, divider-not-a-uniter, inept imperialist. Vice is bounding
around the country, talking to his usual circumscribed audiences of
conservatives, right-wing think tanks and Fox News anchors. No need to
burrow in the bunker when you've turned America into one.

As they used to say about the Soviet Union, the defensive Bush
imperialists have to keep expanding because they're encircled. Mr.
Cheney's gloomy, scary, contentious world view has fueled a more
gloomy, scary, contentious world.

After disastrously dividing the world into the strong (Bush hawks) and
the weak (everyone else), Vice turned his coarseness into another
macho, tough-guy moment against a Democrat considered a pill by many
Republicans. "I think a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said
badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue," he preened.

The conservatives defending Mr. Cheney are largely the same crowd that
went off the deep end because of a glimpse of breast on the Super
Bowl, demanding everything from fines to new regulations to protect
red states from blue language.

Mr. Cheney's foul outburst was not as bad as his foul reasoning. On
Fox, he again belabored his obsession with "links" between Iraq and Al
Qaeda. Exhibiting WASP chutzpah, this time he used The Times to
bolster his faux case.

But the Thom Shanker story he cited said only that in the mid-1990's,
Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda and that a request
from Osama "to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi
Arabia went unanswered."

Rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda? As a threat to U.S. security,
that's right up there with Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction-related
program activities."

Mr. Cheney assured Fox's anxious viewers that he would stay on the
ticket and in the White House until January '09. (No four letter
words, dear Democrats.) Vice said of W., "he knows I'm there to serve
him."

Mr. Bush must have missed that classic "Twilight Zone" episode where
the aliens arrive with a book entitled, "To Serve Man." It turns out
to be a cookbook.

http://tinyurl.com/3flb5

Be still my heart.
-- 
Gary Denton - She watchs the Twilight Zone Maru

#1 on google for liberal news
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