spin, unlimited

The Bush/Cheney era is down to its final 12 days. They will leave behind their wreckage for Obama's capable team to clean up, and blithely fly off westward in a fog of denial and spin.

The denial and spin are so far removed from the Reality Based World that most of us live in, that it is hard to do anything but laugh at the absurdity. The latest is from Dick Cheney, who has proclaimed himself misunderstood and says that he's really lovable.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that his image has gotten a bad rap in the press and that he is in fact “a warm, lovable sort.”

Cheney conceded in an interview with CBS radio that he sometimes expresses himself “rather forcefully toward some of my compatriots, like Pat Leahy from Vermont” but dismissed as a caricature the idea that he is a “Darth Vader-type personality.”

“I think all of that’s been pretty dramatically overdone,” the vice president said. “I’m actually a warm, lovable sort.”

Cheney also insisted that his influence within the Bush administration was overstated throughout the past eight years. “The notion that somehow I was pulling strings or making presidential-level decisions. I was not,” he said.

“There was never any question about who was in charge. It was George Bush. And that’s the way we operated. This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened."

Yeah, right. We never thought that he shoved Bush out of the way and sat at his desk to sign bills into law. No, he was more subtle than that: like directing that all of Condo Rice's emails be sent through his office before they even went to her, when she was National Security Adviser. Or like controlling the flow of information to Bush, presenting the arguments to him in such a way that the decision Cheney wanted seemed to be the only right one. Or having secret meetings to determine energy policy; or like directing the leak of Valerie Plame's identity or pushing the CIA to give him the direct raw intelligence instead of the result of professional analysts, or declaring himself a fourth branch of government . . . and . . . and . . .

Lovable? I don't think so. I have only two good things to say about him. As far as we know, he didn't take bribes when he broke laws; it was to gain power. And he seemed to have a good, accepting relationship with his lesbian daughter.

And even those aren't without qualification, if you consider the Halliburton no-bid contracts while he still had financial ties to them; and when Mary Cheney's daughter was born, the photos released to the press were of Dick and wife Lynn holding the baby. The baby's two mothers were out of sight, the better to blur the fact that it wasn't the All-American Republican Family.

No, not lovable.

Ralph