While he was this nation's Vice President, we more or less had to permit Dick Cheney the platform from which to give voice to his delusions, his paranoia, his manipulation, his willingness to do the primary job of the terrorist for him - to scare the Slasher-Movie part of the population.
Well he earns no platform any more.
And for the Vice President to deliberately undermine a 17-day old new Administration, in an interview with Politico, earns him the kind of old-fashioned flagellation provided by a Special Comment tonight.
Or if you want you could call it Enhanced Commentary.
"When (Cheney told Politico)we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry."
More concerned, Mr. Cheney?
What delusion of grandeur makes you think you have the right to say anything like that?
Because a president, or an ordinary American, demands that we act as Americans and not as bullies -- demands that we play by our rules -- that we preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States -- you believe we have chosen the one and not the other?
We can be Americans, or we can be what you call "safe" -- but not both?
On the way to invoking Oliver Cromwell, we stop off at John Frankenheimer and Richard Condon.
The Politico story continues:
"Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration - "that's about 11 or 12 percent" - have "gone back into the business of being terrorists."
Mr. Cheney, you made this statistic up.
Perhaps not you personally, but your people made this statistic up!
Mr. Cheney, which orifice are you pulling these numbers from?
You know, in the movie "The Manchurian Candidate," the character based loosely on Joe McCarthy had trouble remembering all the different numbers.
His Lady Macbeth-like-wife pointed out to him that the reason she kept changing the number of purported communists in the state department, was so that people would no longer be asking "are there communists in the state department?"... but would begin only asking "how many communists are there?"
Eventually she picked one number that her husband could remember.
57.
She found it on the bottle of steak sauce on the room service tray.
It's nice to hear Representative Harman
say "it's time to retire the fear card," and for Roger Cressey dismiss as "ludicrous" the idea that Cheney's way is the only way.
And now let's all help him off the stage. Quickly.