Megyn Kelly steps outside the FoxNews stereotype

Last week, Megyn Kelly interviewed Dick Cheney on Fox News.    But it wasn't the typical soapbox that the former VEEP -- and Fox viewers -- have come to expect when they tune in to Fox News.

It's not the first time Megyn Kelly has shown a bit of independence in this hot house of conservatism.  If you remember on election night coverage in 2010, Karl Rove refused to believe that the network had called the election for Obama.   Megyn, anchoring the show, didn't run with Karl's disbelief.   Instead, she walked, microphone in hand, back to the room where the numbers crunchers were working to check it out with them.   So she's got a bit of independence that's not common at that network.

So here's the challenge she put before Dick Cheney after he and daughter Liz had published that WSJ op-ed which included the line, referring to President Obama:  "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many."

"Time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well in Iraq, sir. You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005, and you said that after our intervention, extremists would have to 'rethink their strategy of jihad.' Now, with almost a trillion dollars spent there, with almost 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?"

That would be strong stuff coming from Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, but this was Fox News. Cheney was apparently non-plussed because he flubbed her name.  But he managed to say this: 

No, I just fundamentally disagree, Reagan — I mean, Megyn."

The interview then proceeded with easier questions;  and this week, Fox News made it up to Cheney by giving him a sweetheart interview with Sean Hannity who praised him and all but licked his boots.

Wall Street Journal readers were not so apologetic.   In fact, of the letters to the editor they chose to publish (and responsible newspapers usually choose a relatively representative sample), five out of six pointed out that that phrase actually applied to President Georgia W. Bush and the neo-con architects of the Iraq invasion -- which was the point Megyn's was making to perhaps the most powerful proponent of that invasion.

That was the response from the readers of this center-right newspaper.  More liberal media have begun to ridicule the by-now cartoonish copy of himself that the VEEP has become.   Liz is either too loyal to her father, or else too blind to see that the family would do him and his legacy a kindness by discouraging him from speaking out any more.

But my Schadenfreude inner self enjoys every minute of the public display of his decline into irrelevance.

Ralph