Steve Benen makes a good point about the Dickmentum that Jon Meacham is feeling right now:
Indeed, rank-and-file Republicans were asked in a new poll about who best reflects the party’s principles. Just one chose Dick Cheney — not 1 percent, I mean one individual person.
Republicans deserve a lot of condemnation for making Bush their 2000 nominee and for generally supporting Bush-Cheney policies until the bitter end. But Republican voters never really chose Dick Cheney. Bush won the primary in 2000 before Cheney chose himself to be vice-president, of course. For the first four years of the Bush administration, Cheney had his way with a dumb and weak president. However, by many accounts, from 2005-2008, even this weak and dumb president rejected many of Cheney’s foreign policy ideas (I buy into the idea that the Cheneyites would have gone into Iran but the Condiites managed to nix it, I realize not everyone believes this).
I’m sure that there’s all kinds of polling showing that Republicans are expressing or have expressed reasonable levels of approval for Cheney. That doesn’t prove anything. The party functioned as a Bush personality cult for many years and some amount of support for Cheney was bound to be a byproduct of that. If Republican voters thought of Cheney as the heart and soul of the party now, there would be more than one person in a sample of a 804 who thought he best reflected the party principles.
The disconnect between the Village and the voters here is near total. It isn’t just that Cheney is disliked by the public at large, it’s that rank-and-file Republicans don’t even love him that much.
Cheney is probably too monstrous for outside-the-beltway wingers, as crazy as they are. But he’s not too monstrous for the Village.
neill
no one is too monstrous for the villagers…they are god’s own darlins and it is their world, we just live in it…
TR
Of course not. He’s a Republican.
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
This is good news for John McCain, right?
I haz edit on the touch!
burnspbesq
Cheney will be 69 years old on January 30. Given his health history, I wonder what the actuarial tables tell us about the probability that he will be around on Election Day 2012.
Emma
i have given up reading/listening/viewing all communiques from the Village– just reading about it here makes my blood boil.
Stooleo
Jebus only 69, He looks like hes about 80.
Violet
@TR:
Bingo. In the eyes of the Villagers, Republicans can do no wrong. Even the Republicans with zipper problems seem to be treated with more of a kid glove treatment than was ever afforded Clinton.
DougJ
I haz edit on the touch!
Are you using a special app?
kommrade reproductive vigor
See? Cheney isn’t a celebrity like Obama.
The fact that no one except his wife picked him shows he is a modest man who kept out of the limelight and isn’t the one to let concerns about popularity hinder his quest to do what’s right for America.
Violet
@Stooleo:
He also looks like the Penguin in the Batman TV show. And when he was wheeled out in his wheelchair for Obama’s inauguration, he looked like a standard issue Bad Guy from central casting.
All of his horrible policies and personal issues aside, I have a hard time imagining many people feeling very enthusiastic about voting for a Bad Guy from the movies or TV. Wham! Pow!
beltane
Dick Cheney is to our Village courtiers as Rasputin was to the court of Czar Nicholas: a mystical, larger than life figure, who mesmerized the pampered fools to their own detriment. To the rest of us, Cheney is a madman and a monstrosity; to the Villagers he is Godlike and omniscient. This is just another sign that we are in the midst of some kind of degeneracy.
John Cole
Don’t fool yourself.
Cheney’s problem with the rank and file isn’t that he is too monstrous for their tastes, it is that he is either unwilling or incapable of quoting the good book. If Cheney could mixture in some scripture every now and then, throw the evangelicals a bone, and talk about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth when talking about Iran, the rank and file would vote for him in a heartbeat.
Their problem isn’t monsters, it is monsters who can’t speak the native tongue.
General Winfield Stuck
This kinds a sorta happens in every two termed presnitcy. Where DC becomes full of partisan supporters for the incumbents in the WH, Slowly over eight years, they get plugged into the DC wurlitzer, and when it’s over, it takes some time for things to wind down and be replaced by the new admin., and it’s especially stark when the other party takes over.
Most of the time however, a two term president leaves with some general support in tact by rank and file party folks out in the countryside and don’t suffer a wide schism of belief between the DC hangers on and supporters outside. But Bush/Cheney were pretty much reviled by about 70 percent of the country the last 3 years of their term, that included a lot of Goopers, and that caused a huge break between rank and file supporters and the punditocracy and others still in the Village.
This and other reasons are why what we hear from the MSM is so different than what average repubs think. And it shows brightly how out of touch and reactionary our media has become. Not to mention short sighted and dumb as rocks.
ItAintEazy
So?!
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
@DougJ:
No, just safari.
Edit: But I’ve never noticed it before
Wile E. Quixote
@burnspbesq
As long as he avoids direct sunlight and continues to sleep in a coffin filled with his native soil I’d say that they’re pretty good.
licensed to kill time
Cheney in the wheelchair at the Inauguration, lacking only the Persian cat to complete the Blofeldian image. I always see that in my mind’s eye when I hear Cheney hissing. But I think “Dr. Eeeeeeeeville”…….
Noonan
I’m still stuck on this entire exercise swinging on the “resolute refusal of the opposition party” during the Bush years.
Uh: Iraq War. Afghan War. No Child. Medicare D. Patriot Act.
That looks more like the party of Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?
Wile E. Quixote
Only peripherally related to this topic, Michele Malkin and Dan Riehl have really got the hate on for Mike Huckabee about the Maurice Clemmons pardon, and from looking at some posts over at FreeRepublic I’d have to say that Huckabee’s chances of running for the presidency in 2012 are well and thoroughly hucked. It’s wingnut cannibalism at it’s finest.
Violet
@Wile E. Quixote:
Yeah, Huckabee failed their purity test in a big way. It’s kind of fun to watch them eat their own. Off to get more popcorn.
SpotWeld
In other words, Cheney gives great sound bites. So the media loves him and assumes that his party should be loving him. But Cheney isn’t playing the “bible Spice” game, so his party is having trouble dancing to his beat.
ChrisS
@Violet:
Except that the only noise generated will be that pardoning or granting clemency is a sissy-liberal idea,
Progressives will be painted with this brush in a big way.
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
@Wile E. Quixote:
{golf clap}
well played, sir. Well played.
harlana pepper
And yet, Jon Meacham is considered a liburrul within said Village and Cheney would gut him with a hunting knife if he ever met him in person and actually knew how to hunt bona fide
JenJen
This Dick Cheney as candidate talk is just nauseating. He’s not running, OK? He’ll never run. He got everything he ever wanted without having to bear up to the scrutiny of a run at higher office. He’s sure as hell not about to start now. It’s even stupider then continuing to float this belief that Sarah Palin is going to run in 2012. Please, make them stop.
Speaking of Villagers, what really matters is a nice, snappy salute! Don’t miss the off-screen giggles when Bill Clinton’s very name is mentioned. Assholes.
Jason
Cheney’s victory in 2012 would be unprecedented, should it happen.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
You all are looking in the wrong place. This Villager psyops campaign may be laying laurels at the feet of Dick, but Liz is the Cheney who will run for office in 2012 or 2016. The Village is just working on burnishing the Cheney family reputation to smooth the way for Liz.
Remember, always two there are. A Master and an Apprentice.
Wile E. Quixote
On the wingnut cannibalism front I’d really like to see someone ask Sarah Palin what she thinks about Huckabee’s securing parole for Wayne Dumond and granting clemency to Maurice Clemmons. I’m sure that her reply would be as amusing as her statement that perhaps South Carolina voters should mount a primary challenge against Lindsey Graham so that the boy can get his mind right..
Sentient Puddle
Jesus…the Villagers are more out of touch with reality than the Republican base?
Kerry Reid
Most mainstream media types, especially at Meacham’s level, are raised on the puerile notion that it’s not news unless it involves fussin’, feudin’, fuckin’ and fightin’, which is why a good sex scandal gets them every time over a hard-to-explain financial disaster. And this is also why cable news and reality television have become virtually indistinguishable from each other.
Given that Meacham, et al, operate at the level of intellectual and emotional maturity of 11-year-old “Star Wars” fans (but with a less-developed moral compass), it’s not surprising that they’d love to see a simplistic showdown between the Jedi and Darth Vader. It’s the same reason they were all panting at the prospect of a Rudy/Hillary fight in 2008 and were prematurely declaring that match-up “inevitable” (as if saying could make it so), because they had been denied that vicarious thrill when Rudy had to drop out of the NY Senate race. Lacking any intellectual interiority that might add meaning to their existences, media “pundits” thrive on the offal of other people’s fights. Because they’re too limp to really do any of their own fighting.
Get a Villager in the crosshairs and he/she will either miss the point entirely (the entire White House press corps at the dinner where Colbert delivered that inutterably brilliant keynote, dismissed by the Insufferable Morons in the Room as “unfunny” and a “failure” until millions of YouTube hits showed up), or they’ll whine incessantly on Twitter. (Chuck Todd, all the time.)
bemused
@John Cole:
I just got an instant ice cold chill reading that but you’re right.
Just Some Fuckhead
Ya gotta be a mean, dumb “Christian” man to get the Republican nomination.
Cheney is mean enough but he isn’t Christian enough. Huckabee is Christian enough but he isn’t mean enough. Palin is dumb enough but she isn’t man enough. Romney is man enough but he fails all the other tests.
Pawlenty is the wild card everyone is hoping will ace all four categories.
freelancer
OT – LGM for the win:
Just Some Fuckhead
@John Cole:
Gotta be unwilling. Hell, even The Devil knows and quotes Scripture, amirite?
Rhoda
@John Cole:
So true. And so scary.
It’s why I think the GOP will go with Sarah Palin; and then have a Gingrich run as the Cheney. They put an evangelical face on the usual GOP crazy.
JMHO
JenJen
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Love the way you put that. But doesn’t Haley Barbour fill the order?
geg6
Jon Meacham needs to go back to being a historian, which he did pretty well. But first he needs to explain how a pretty decent historian manages to go through life without ever learning anything from that history he writes. Darth Cheney isn’t gonna run for anything, let alone win. My advice is to spend the day watching the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert on HBO OnDemand. It’s the awesome. Jeff Beck rules and so do Simon and Garfunkel.
Just Some Fuckhead
@JenJen:
Who?
geg6
Holy shit. I have edit and delete on the Blackberry. Cole, you rock!
General Winfield Stuck
Cheney is a walking indictment. And I don’t mean from his torture proclivities. There is a huge closet of skeletons throughout the fed government, but especially in war contracting, and even more especially through the Corp of Engineers contracting department./ While Dick was on teevee pushing for his bloodlust war in Iraq, his Capo David Addington and others in the Veep office were out stealing the crown jewels for his buds at Haliburton and elsewhere. Not to mention all sorts of shenanigans, likely illegal, of sabotaging any federal agency that regulates bidness affecting their bottom lines.
I don’t know if Holder is investigating all this, or not, but for Cheney to get the nom for wingnuts in 012, all that would be rummaged through in detail, and I think Cheney knows this and wouldn’t dare throw his hat in. The torture stuff, he will go to his dirt bed in hell being proud of and would likely not stop him from running and claiming he did it to protect American Babies from getting blown up in Kansas. But the financial misdeeds he could not make that claim.
chuck
@General Winfield Stuck:
Lemme clear it up for ya: not.
General Winfield Stuck
@chuck:
And you know this How?
licensed to kill time
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I think TLTIABQ is right, it’s all about the Liz. Cheney’s too old/heart’s gonna go, too hated or at least disliked by practically everyone, has too many skeletons in the closet, etc etc. The Villagers just like Big Daddy to come on the teevee to deliver Authoritarian diktat and pump up their ratings.
Liz is the Cheney to watch out for.
JGabriel
DougJ:
True, but despite Liz Cheney’s advocacy on her Dad’s behalf, I don’t think Dick really wants to be president. I think he’d much rather be VP to a weak P — Palin or Pawlenty probably. Someone stupid, ignorant, vain, and full of themselves, who can be easily manipulated.
.
Mnemosyne
@General Winfield Stuck:
Come on, everyone knows the best way to investigate corruption on a massive scale is to announce ahead of time that’s what you’re doing so everyone has time to shred the evidence.
licensed to kill time
@JGabriel:
Which is why the Liz for Pres would be so scary – Big Daddy pulling her strings from backstage in the shadows. He’d relish that role.
Delia
@JGabriel:
Not sure about Pawlenty, but I think Palin’s a no-go in the easily-manipulated category. She certainly qualifies as stupid, ignorant, vain, and full of herself. But she’d blow off anybody who tried to control her.
JGabriel
ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Perhaps. But with a resume not much better than Pat Buchanan’s in 1996 (some fed experience via patronage, followed by punditry), Torture Spice would poll about the same.
Unless, maybe, the Lizard wants to be VP herself, to someone meeting the same criteria I outlined for Daddy’s presidential preferences: stupid, ignorant, vain, full of themselves, and easily manipulated .
Damn, I can’t believe I just made the case for Palin/L. Cheney, 2012.
I really hope it’s not possible. But I bet that’s what the Villagers want — it’d be great for ratings!
.
General Winfield Stuck
@Mnemosyne:
I think Holder should just deputize the liberal blogosphere and let them have at it. Maybe that would satisfy, but I doubt it.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Delia
Much of Cheney’s power derived from exploiting what the President didn’t know. Which in the case of The Palinator would be damn near infinite.
Delia
@Shawn in ShowMe:
That’s true. I suppose if she just bought clothes and posed for photo-ops the guys behind the scenes could do anything they damn well pleased.
Roger Moore
@John Cole:
This. Cheney also has a problem in that he hasn’t disowned his lesbian daughter, Mary. He’s even gone so far as to suggest that gay marriage is a State issue and the Federal government should butt out. I doubt that’s won him any supporters among the god botherers.
Brian J
It’s not ridiculous for Republicans to focus on electability, nor is it bad, judging from our end, to think of this issue through that angle. I say this because I find it highly unlikely that any Republican who deviates from the party platform in some major way will secure the nomination unless he or she makes up for what with zealousness in another area. They will, I’m pretty sure, all hit a certain number of marks. Cheney could make up for his relative acceptance of gay marriage by doubling down on the plans to bomb any nation that rolls its eyes at America, but I can’t imagine him coming out from a nomination process unscathed by advocating tax increases.
So if you accept the idea that the Republicans are looking more for check list of values, you can assume they don’t particularly care who the nominee is. They just want to win, because they believe they more or less know who they are getting.
How does all of this relate to Cheney? He won’t get the nomination, much less win, because there’s nothing compelling about his personality. He doesn’t offer ideological purity compared to other candidates. Like I said before, whomever the nominee is will sound the same. So if they can get the same sort of value set that they’d get with Cheney but not be forced to try to win with a toxic personality, they’ll do it. And they will: they’ll nominate someone else.
By the way, I don’t make much of Sarah Palin’s chances for exactly the same reasons.
LD50
@John Cole:
To be fair, that may not be his choice to make. This might have been a condition of the pact with Satan he signed long ago.
...now I try to be amused
@beltane:
I think of Cheney as the Dzerzhinsky to Bush’s Stalin.
gbear
On MN public radio’s lunchtime call-in show, author/pudnit (not sic) Douglas Brinkley was saying that Cheney had become a grand statesman of politics and because of this he’s in great demand as a speaker and a television guest.
He also said that Reagan’s foreign policy was a fabulous success (after a caller drolly commented that Reagan’s foreign policy really and truly sucked).
I agree with the folks who’ve said that the reason Cheney was in a wheelchair during Obama’s inauguration was because he wasn’t going to be forced (by protocol or decency) to stand for that black man. It was staged.
Alex S.
Dick Cheney for VP in 2012!
(joke)
LD50
@gbear:
I always assumed he was coyly trying to reprise David Huddleston’s role in the Big Lebowski.
HRA
@JenJen:
I mentioned Haley Barbour in another thread. He was chairman of the GOP and now governor of Mississippi. He handled Katrina really well for his state. He has been on several news shows lately and he is not one to make nasty remarks about anyone.
Cheney would have his health problems against him. Liz Cheney would be appropriate for a Fox spot and nothing else.
Choosing Pawlenty would be a win for the Dems. He’s an empty suit IMO.
Cat Lady
Cheney operates in secret, and the rigors of running for president don’t suit his “strengths”. He’s unpleasant, he can’t smile and wave, and he growls when he talks. Liz Cheney is a less principled Tonya Harding. Sarah Palin is an idiot diva, she can’t finish anything she starts, she can’t stay on script, she can’t be stage managed because she’s a “maverick”, and she loves the whole policy-free going rogue shtick. Huck can’t win over the Cheney-ites, especially now, Mittens can’t be trusted by the Palin or Huck lovers, and Pawlenty just won’t be able to excite anyone about anything, along the lines of a McCain. Ensign and Sanford are damaged goods punch lines, and Haley Barbour – not a face or voice for TV. As one of our esteemed hosts said here, they got nuthin’ but the media, which ain’t nuthin, but even the media will need something to work with. The prime directive for media exposure is to be telegenic. This is a reality show to them, people.
phoebes-in-santa fe
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: You’re absolutely right. Liz sounds just like her father. She’d be a natural, plus she may even have a sound ticker.
Do you live in Albuquerque?
LD50
@HRA:
Myeaaaaah… A doughy conservative old white man from Mississippi for POTUS, complete with syrupy accent. That’s definitely the way American demographics are trending these days.
Dunno how he’ll compete with Jindal, tho.
phoebes-in-santa fe
@JGabriel: “Vain”, “easily manipulated”?
Oh, you mean someone like George W Bush?
JenJen
@LD50: Barbour is doughy, conservative, white, and a full ten years younger than the last Republican nominee. Why, he is the base.
I say he’s as good an option as any of these Palin-Cheney fantasies the Villagers are floating around.
LD50
@JenJen: Well, yes, I’m sure every single teabagger in the country would vote for him, but you know, that wasn’t quite my point…
Shawn in ShowMe
@LD50
Given the weakness of the current roster, I imagine the GOP leadership is pulling out all the stops to woo Petraeus. They couldn’t stop the stimulus bill, they’re not going to stop health care reform so all they have left is the military angle.
The strategy is simple: whatever Obama ultimately decides on Af-Pak, Petraeus says that he would have done the opposite.
Alex S.
I have to agree, Barbour makes a lot of sense now (in the republican sense of sense). And, as mentioned in the other thread, Rick Perry. With Gingrich failing the purity test and Huckabee failing the toughness test, there is an opening for a southerner, a white southerner, a white conservative southerner, a white conservative southerner not busy with spreading the purity in the Senate.
JR
I just can’t get outraged over this article like other people seem to be. To me, he’s simply saying if Cheney RAN for president he would be in the hotseat and would have nowhere to hide from all the questions left over from the past eight years. He would almost certainly not get elected but it would put an end to all the “dithering” comments as he is forced to defend his record to the world. A Cheney RUN would be the investigation we never had, and republicans would have to decide if this is what they still want to continue to support. I do NOT think he’s suggesting Cheney would make a good president.
JenJen
@LD50: I know, but I thought we were talking about what it might take to win the 2012 GOP nomination?
CalD
The press is always behind the curve. Even makes sense when you consider that it’s (supposed to be) their job to report news, not to create it. Anytime you’re asking reporters to prognosticate rather than simply report, you kind of deserve whatever you get. (Kinda like asking pollsters for strategic advice.) And that’s something we do pretty routinely these days.
It’s possible that in addition to its government, every country also has the news media it deserves.
Anne Laurie
@John Cole:
Except that the Repub rank & file also has a preference, arguably even stronger than the Dem preference, for monsters that can approximate the 1950s version of a a B-movie ‘star’ (c.f. St. Ronnie). Even when Cheney was a young pallid little CREEPster in the bowels of the Nixon White House, he looked like Grima Wormtongue. Part of the Talibangelical distortion of American Calvinism is the idea that “good” people look prosperous, healthy & attractive (for fairly low values of attractive) — that’s one reason Newt Gingrich and Jerry Falwell did better than Huckabee and Jimmy Swaggert. If the Talibangelical’s god really loved Dick Cheney, and vice versa, Cheney wouldn’t look like a Bond villain’s less successful brother-in-law.
jwb
@Delia: “Palin’s a no-go in the easily-manipulated category. She certainly qualifies as stupid, ignorant, vain, and full of herself. But she’d blow off anybody who tried to control her.”
She’s also in it almost entirely for the money, which is why, despite everything, she is not particularly dangerous.
jwb
@Alex S.: Yes, presuming Gov. Goodhair survives the wingnut primary against Hutchison, I think he’d be in good position for 2012.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@phoebes-in-santa fe:
Yes.
From what I can tell from chance comments and handles, there is a pretty substantial NM mafia here in the BJ commentariat. Not sure why, although since the state recently flipped from red to pretty strongly blue, it may have something to do with having an affinity with John’s political evolution.
Ruckus
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
You mean a Cheney and Cheney ticket? One young, one old. Both vile, mean, selfish, assholes. The perfect conservatard ticket. And the dick gets to be
puppetmastervp again.Sentient Puddle
@jwb: Last I heard, Goodhair was polling pretty well above Hutchinson. Which of course has nothing at all to do with her decision to not resign from the Senate before the end of the year as she had originally planned.
But I don’t know, he doesn’t strike me as someone who could actually be electable in a general election. Primary, sure. And yes, that may well be the point.
Anne Laurie
@JGabriel:
Never mind herding the Talibangelicals into voting for a lesbian VP — does anyone believe Palin would agree to spend significant time sharing a bathroom and/or eating utensils with “one of those”? She might be willing to make the offer if one of her pet Christianist preachers would announce that he’d prayed the ghey out of Liz, but that would require Liz to announce that she’d been less-than-perfect pre-conversion, and I don’t think feigning such humility is in the Cheney skill set. The Bush/Cheney
regencypair-up worked because each partner believed they were craftily using the other for their own advantage; a Palin/Cheney pair-up won’t happen because they each so publicly despise the other’s every “strength”.ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Ruckus:
If I had to bet, I’d say Liz would either make it onto the VP slot of a 2012 ticket, or more likely is being prep’d for a real run in 2016.
licensed to kill time
@Anne Laurie:
I don’t think the Liz is the les, it’s Mary.
Mary, of course, can marry.
Liz is les lucky.
(I wanted to make a poem out of that/no offense)
Kerry Reid
Liz Cheney isn’t the lesbian daughter. That’s Mary.
Anne Laurie
@JenJen:
And watching Barbour’s smarmy Confederate-sympathiser punim getting flayed by President Obama in debate would give all us DFHs starbursts enough to save on our heating bills all winter, which is why I think Haley’s not quite dumb enough to risk his current soft gig just for the chance to hear the Media Village Idiots discuss his ‘presidential timbre.’
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6:
Seriously??? I have never ever had edit/delete on the ‘Berry, and it makes me weep to think of the hoops I have to jump through to italicize. And forget about links or blockquote. Is there a nice trick I’m overlooking? (SATSQ: Yes, Siubhan, there probably is.)
Ruckus
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I think you’re right but I was working on the wet dream ticket – she does well in a couple of primaries, then picks dad for vp.
Anne Laurie
@licensed to kill time:
You know that, I know that, but do you think Palin knows that? Or that Bible Spice’s “base” wouldn’t run screaming in all directions trying to figure it out, especially after Say-rah made some kind of damning and idiotic statement on-camera when some Media Village Idiot raised the possibility?
I think Liz Cheney would like to run for her beloved father’s old position, if only to prove she could be the son he always wanted. But I don’t think she’ll get much traction with the Permanent Republican Party until/unless Hillary Clinton runs (for VP in 2012, or for President in 2016), because I think the best she can do with the Repub base is to brand herself as the anti-Hillary.
Just Some Fuckhead
Surely Danger Monkey has ruined it for all Texas Governors now?
JWC
For what it is worth, my conservative son, who voted for Bush twice (mostly based on right to life ideals) is and has always been convinced that all the “bad” in the Bush administration was from Cheney. He believes that Bush was basically a good guy, but Cheney was evil.
Logical, not. But I expect there are a lot of people who share that opinion.
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
BTW in case anyone is thinking, wondering, laughing, whatever, I don’t hate a lot of things in the world. Anything with the name Cheney is one of those things I hate. With a passion. Even if you’re not related to them. If it was me I’d change my name, just for the possibility that there is a god of some sort, and he/she/it is vengeful.
eemom
1. As I’ve said b4, Cheney is the Antichrist, and that is why he won’t die. Evidently his cheerleaders are aware of this.
2. Nothing’s too monstrous for the emmessemm, because they don’t fucking CARE what happens to this country. No one’s gonna send them or their kids to die in a war or take away their house or their money or their healthcare. That is why it is all a game to them.
SiubhanDuinne
@Anne Laurie:
He’s term-limited. Mississippi holds their next gubernatorial election in November 2011. So he wouldn’t be exactly risking his current soft gig, but given that presidential campaigns take at least two years now, he’d have to declare in early 2011 latest, and would be all lame-ducky and stuff.
Haley sounds like a good ol’ Southern fool, but I think it would be a big mistake to misunderestimate his brains and his cunning. He’s a wily Haley, he is, and he’s perfected that aw-shucks jes’ home folks drawl — which can be very misleading. I’m no fan and I would never vote for him (although I will say he did wonders in his state post-Katrina), but he could actually be a formidable candidate for the GOP in 2012.
arguingwithsignposts
@JWC:
I can almost believe that. Bush was a bumbling idiot, but not pure evil in the way Cheney was. After all, he didn’t pardon Scooter Libby.
mak
The very fact that someone, somewhere is even floating the notion of Darth Cheney as presidential candidate should be cause for celebration, since it only underscores the complete lack of palatable alternatives in the GOP. I’m looking at you, Caribou Barbie.
However, my paranoid chicken-little side tells me that the Cheney talk, like the soon to be over Palinpalooza, is is just off-year filler, preparation for the launching of a real candidate like Petraeus or that Chinese-speaking governor dude from Utah (I personally think that Pawlenty or Governor Goodhair would be easy pickens). It’s too soon for the real candidates to show themselves in earnest, especially when the competition is so busy writing their primary opponents’ campaign ads (still looking at you, Sarah) or watching their past actions destroy their future plans (sorry ’bout that, Huck).
arguingwithsignposts
@SiubhanDuinne:
but he could actually be a formidable candidate for the GOP in 2012.
I think Haley has too many skeletons in the closet too, but those don’t get dug up in Mississippi gubernatorial races like they would in the presidential. He was the head of the RNC, and a lobbyist.
emphasis mine
licensed to kill time
@Anne Laurie:
Good question – I’d love to see her splutter if asked about it.
I bet some of her best friends are lesbians. You know, any of her friends, all of ’em, that get put in front of her on a daily basis.
JenJen
@Anne Laurie:
Really? To paraphrase The West Wing’s Leo McGarry, I think he’s exactly that dumb.
DougJ
Barbour is a smart guy. I think he’s just too southern to win as a Republican right now. He’s like a bad stereotype.
One thing about Barbour, and actually about all the other Republicans being discussed in 2012: while I wouldn’t vote for any of them in a general election, I don’t see any evidence that any of them (except possibly Palin) is a monster on the scale of Dick Cheney.
It’s entirely possible that one or all of them will go on to torture, start unnecessary wars, store all of their papers in huge subterranean lockers, shoot friends in the face. etc. But they haven’t yet. So if I were somehow allowed to vote in the Republican primary, I would vote for any of them over Cheney.
arguingwithsignposts
Well, Mitt does wear magic underwear.
General Winfield Stuck
@DougJ:
He invented the southern drawwel, or at least perfected it.
HRA
@LD50:
“Myeaaaaah… A doughy conservative old white man from Mississippi for POTUS, complete with syrupy accent. That’s definitely the way American demographics are trending these days.
Dunno how he’ll compete with Jindal, tho.”
Exactly. Though I doubt Jindal is going to be thought of considering his big flub in prime time as the Republican response to Obama.
There won’t be any big problem of how Hailey made his money for the GOP even though they used it against Gore.
SiubhanDuinne
@arguingwithsignposts:
You may well be right. I’ve never heard of what I would call skeletons (other than, you know, being an overweight white Southerner with a heavy drawl) but I expect a halfway decent oppo research team could find plenty.
Yeah, he was, and by me that’s enough right there to disqualify him, but I would expect much of the GOP electorate to view that background as a feature, not a bug.
Again, I personally find that a repellant way to make money, but I wonder whether it would be a deal-breaker for Republican voters, either in the primary or general.
Nellcote
Exactly what “wonders” did Barbour do for his state post-Katrina, keeping in mind that he’s a white good ole boy republican? There are still MS. gulfcoast towns that haven’t been rebuilt and insurance claims that haven’t been paid.
LD50
@DougJ:
That’s what I was trying to get at. Half the country will look at him and immediately be reminded of some Senator Claghorn type, trying to block civil rights legislation.
I can definitely see Palin shooting a friend in the face. But with her, I don’t think it’d be an ‘accident’.
Well, that would depend on whether you actually wanted a Republican to win, wouldn’t it?
LD50
@Nellcote: My guess would be, knowing nothing about it, that if the right still approves of his performance, that means that the nice wealthy white people all got their houses rebuilt and the poor or nonwhite people who lost their homes were kept off TV.
Midnight Marauder
@JR:
I don’t know if “outraged” is the right word, but the main critique I’ve seen of this inane article (and it’s one I agree with whole-heartedly) is that we’ve already done this song and dance before. It was called the 2008 Presidential Election.
Granted, McCain/Palin may not have been an exact replica of Bush/Cheney policies, but on the whole, the differences between the two camps was minimal. A vote for McCain/Palin was, in essence, a vote to continue running the country through the prism of ideology set forth during the Bush/Cheney years. Well, guess what? Those folks lost. Badly. The end. So the “outrage” doesn’t come from the idea proposed by Meacham; it comes from the fact that this imbecile is proposing his idea after the country just spent the past two years executing it on a daily basis, in earnest.
And to the point about Cheney “being in the hot seat” if he ran for president, and the subsequent election being “the investigation we never had”–WHAT IN THE FUCKING WORLD MAKES YOU THINK THE TRADITIONAL MEDIA WOULD DO SUCH A THING?! I mean, come on now. That’s just some of the silliest, laziest, doe-eyed thinking I’ve heard in quite some time.
And a final point on Jinal running for the Republican nomination in 2012: Are you people talking about the Bobby Jindal with the brown skin? The one who’s chock full o’ Indian heritage? No, you are not talking about that Bobby Jindal. Surely, you must mean this
Sammy Sosa-iziednew and improved Bobby Jindal?Edit: OH SHIT, SON! Edit is back (at least on Safari…bitches.)
Steeplejack
@burnspbesq:
Amen. He was in a wheelchair at Obama’s inauguration, for chrissakes!
Shell Goddamnit
I think she’d only blow off people trying to control her if they wanted her to do something haaaard. Otherwise it’s all dandyfine sage advice.
I’m lazy, okay? I recognize it.
Shell Goddamnit
That’s brilliant, that is. Think of poor Italy.
But then… Venezuela. Media tends to be run by elites. Elites tend to get in the way of progressive policies. So. Media is pretty much always on the side of the devil. Sometimes individuals manage to get around it, but basically, freedom of the press is for rich people that own presses & always has been.
Paul in KY
Someone back up top was comparing Darth Cheney to Rasputin.
I would like to throw in a good word for the desceased monk. He is on record as having counseled both the Czar & Czarina to not declare war on Imperial Germany. He forsaw a bloodbath for both Russia & the House of Romanov.
History proved him right on both instances. So, compare Cheney to Emporer Palpitine, Sauron, etc. But, IMO, he not fit to wipe the drool off Rasputin’s shoes.