Cheney, Man of Conviction? Or, Man Who Should Be Convicted?

Jon Meacham in Newsweek

I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting. A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions.

It's flabbergasting, really, the cartoonish buffoonery that passes for wit in the Village.

Liberals and lattes, again? I think it is a safe bet to say that the GOPers who hob-nob with doughy stuffed shirt Jon Meacham are as or more likely to be sipping lattes themselves as are any self-identified liberals one might happen to meet. Why not just say people who vote for Democrats are FAGS and be done with it? Why not let the world know you are just a dumb fourteen year old bully, Jon Meacham, deep down where all the oozy oily Hitler-mustachioed monsters are always screaming, screaming, screaming inside?

And then, just as mind-boggling, really, there is this ardent pining for a "full and frank exchange" and a "contest of competing visions" between Republicans and Democrats. Honestly.

It is as if there weren't an election at all for Jon Meacham. It is as if all the relentless and unprecedented Republican obstructionism looks to Jon Meacham like the earnest membership of a disappointed debate club desperate to talk about ideas. It is as if Cheney's relentlessly sub-basement poll numbers both in office and right up to the present never meant anything, never quite registered as real to Jon Meacham.

For Jon Meacham, no doubt, there is indeed always to be discerned a serious "ambiguity about the will of the people." No doubt there is always a promising exploitable glimmer of ambiguity available to be nudged like dough by the likes of Jon Meacham into a cozy manufactured consent to whatever is on the corporate-militarist menu for today.

Every contrary result, every anti-war protest sending hundreds of thousands into the street, every poll that decries crony capitalists slurping at the trough, every election that throws out another Christianist freak or corporate shill vanishes down the memory hole or provides the set-up for the inevitable demand for do-over after do-over.

Just a reminder, Jon Meacham, but "that bracing referendum" on the competing visions of the snarling Nixonian Cheney versus the chirpy compromising Obama did indeed already take place, and the results were hardly ambiguous. And however many times it is restaged the result will always endlessly indicate that Americans hate Dick Cheney and everything he stands for whereupon the whiny white guys and pinch-faced Church ladies of the rancid right wing will ignore reality and nominate themselves the "moral majority" in their amoral minority, or "Real Americans" who want to tyrannize majorities of fellow Americans, or "values voters" who vote profits over people every time.