I know I shouldn’t be surprised by anything Dick Cheney says, but sweet, weepin’ Jeebus:
“When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life-and-death decisions, some of them decisions as commander-in-chief, who has the responsibility for sending some of our young men and women into harm’s way, that man is Mitt Romney,” Cheney said, according to The Associated Press.
Let’s review, shall we? The largest terrorist attack in US history occurred on Bush-Cheney’s watch, and they responded so ineptly that the cornered mastermind was able to escape to Pakistan while US troops were ensnared in the longest war in US history. Then Bush-Cheney trumped up another war with a country that had fuck-all to do with the 9/11 attacks, a war that killed tens of thousands of people and drained the US Treasury to no good purpose (unless you’re Halliburton).
And now the wizened old reptile who orchestrated this world-historical clusterfuck has the unmitigated gall to not only dis the dude who is cleaning up his fucking mess, but to render an opinion on who else is fit to send “our young men and women into harm’s way”?
Now we know why Cheney has a bum ticker: His heart was overworked from a lifetime of trying to circulate blood through his freakishly massive balls. Chutzpah? That doesn’t even begin to cover it. Lack of self awareness? There isn’t a negative scale large enough to capture it, even if it extends into infinity.
I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist, but I would make an exception in Cheney’s case. He should be fitted with a shock collar that zaps him every time he utters the words “9/11” or “crisis” or “war” or “commander-in-chief” or “decisions” or “harm’s way.” Better yet, it should just zap the bastard if he opens his yap at all.
Romney’s next fundraising stop: the federal pen in Butler, North Carolina, where he will dine in the prison mess with Bernie Madoff and receive Madoff’s glowing endorsement for his financial acumen.
[X-posted at Rumproast]
arguingwithsignposts
Relax, Betty, it’s Cheneytown.
amk
Do replacement hearts suffer coronary attacks ?
Southern Beale
When all else fails (and it is), HIT THE PANIC BUTTON!
C’mon, fear is all these people have. And does anyone think this dog whistle crap will work? Now that they can’t use their buddies like Tom Ridge to raise the terror threat level or “find” Al Qaeda videos at convenient times, they’re just blathering like idiots.
Violet
So what’s Cheney’s approval rating compared to W’s approval rating? Higher? Lower? Does the American public have any idea he was the power behind the throne?
amk
@Southern Beale: tom ridge for veep ! Victory!
Xecky Gilchrist
@Violet: Last I saw, Cheney’s approval was considerably lower than Dubya’s.
Which makes me wonder how much Obama’s campaign team paid him to endorse Romney.
Peregrinus
Reptiles would like a word with you regarding their being compared to Cheney.
jwb
@Violet: Pure wingnuts still love them some Cheney and something like this will at this point only appeal to wingnut. I read it as a sign that Romney is still having to work hard to consolidate his base.
maya
“The only MEN fit to lead fighting future wars are those who were deferred from fighting past wars.”
Richard B. Cheney, the Shorter
NotMax
To riff on “It’s A Wonderful Life” —
Every time the G.O.P. dog whistle sounds, a devil gets its horns.
cathyx
From Cheney’s point of view, Romney is the one to do what is necessary in a crisis moment. Romney knows just who to give those lucrative government contracts to when the time comes.
donnah
Remember when he had the transplant, and someone said, “Medical history was made today when a human heart was fitted into an asshole?”
Well, he’s an asshole, alright. What he says should carry no weight with anyone, anywhere at any time. He should be in prison.
PeakVT
Shorter Cheney: Romney is a heartless bastard, just like me, and will have no compunction about getting Americans killed for little or no reason. His business record proves it.
NonyNony
@jwb:
THIS.
Another signal that Romney’s internal polls are saying that he’s having problems locking up the base who wouldn’t vote for him in the primaries.
It’s probably a stupid idea, but with all of the flail-fail of Team Romney over the last few weeks, I wonder if they’re seriously concerned about losing the nomination at the convention, so they’re shoring up as much support as they can pre-convention.
ETA: I know it would be unprecedented for the convention to ditch the candidate who got them the nomination, but I am seriously kind of wondering if Romney is worried about a Republican equivalent of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. I don’t know what a Republican equivalent of that would look like, but there are definitely some conservatives who are very angry about Romney and they might decide to be vocal about it.
auntie beak
brilliantly put, ms. cracker. brilliant.
cathyx
Going into war and committing troops to die for American imperialism is just a business decision. One needs to be able to do it without emotion. Romney is the man.
LosGatosCA
Incompetent war criminal endorsing likely felon, indisputable liar.
That’s today’s GOP!
amk
@NonyNony: For all that ‘base raising’, willard did not allow himself to be photographed with darth. What that does tell you ?
methinks he was in there for some more money.
jwb
@amk: “For all that ‘base raising’, willard did not allow himself to be photographed with darth. What that does tell you ?” Romney is nothing if not an expert at hedging.
the Conster
9/11 is supposed to trigger the fear his admin spent so much time cultivating. For Cheney 9/11 is like the best day of his life, and he’s just pining for the good old days when he was “big time”. He’s just a sick old washed up out of touch crank with no constituency. His favorables leaving office was around 11%. Heckuva job Mitt.
Mino
Well, Cheney is a big fan of fighting the wrong war for as long as possible, so, yep, Mitt’s his man.
Mino
@NonyNony: Paultards tasered in the parks. What a hoot!
Davis X. Machina
The potential rewards were nearly infinite.
Wars are good for politics. A war made Mrs. Thatcher. Roosevelt, Lincoln — war presidents. It’s the only reason anyone except historians remembers Wilson.
Properly conducted, and exploited, in a nation of jingos, the Iraq war could have enabled the GOP to win elections for a generation, having shrunk the Democrats down to a rump the size of the 1993 Canadian Conservatives. Hell, the Democrats would have competed in how fast they could marginalize themselves. You could even not-win, and do O.K. — look at Nixon. The trick is to not lose.
The oil — langiappe. The money for defense contractors? Gravy. Win the war, then you get to write the laws, shape the fiscal and monetary policy, craft the regulatory environment, appoint the judges, essentially run the world’s largest economy deep into mid-century, without let or hindrance. It would have been the 1980’s all over again, just better. The One-Party state was right there, for the taking. They could taste it.
Iraq wasn’t a war — it was the world’s most expensive campaign commercial.
And thank God they fucked it up. They came this close to ‘Game over’.
dmsilev
@amk:
That despite the advent of digital photography, vampires still don’t show up in photographs?
Ripley
“Mitt, you have my endorsement for President.”
“Great, Dick, thanks! We’ll, uh… we’ll just wait til Friday to get that out to the press.”
Davis X. Machina
@NonyNony: No presidential nomination has been decided on the floor of a convention, nor even in its back rooms, in a generation, and none will be in our lifetime. There’s too much at stake.
dr. bloor
Outstanding.
This is all good, though. Cheney just wrote the script for an Obama ad with pix of Cheney and Mittster side-by-side, reminding everyone of what foreign “policy” would look like under an Rmoney presidency.
amk
@NonyNony: Remember they got gunz in florida and you can stand your ground too. Didn’t that fucktard mayor allow open-carry too for the convention ? Fun times.
NonyNony
@amk:
That he’s still wanting to play all sides and doesn’t actually have any core beliefs other than “Mitt Romney should be President”.
He knows a photo of him smiling with Cheney would shave a few tenths of a percentage off from moderates who still have a visceral negative reaction to Cheney. Just another example of him trying to tailor his message for different crowds.
Tractarian
Why does your handle include a racial slur?
The Republic of Stupidity
And some them involving water boarding some poor schmuck we just grabbed off a street corner, and some of them involving whether or not to crush a small child’s testicles in the name of national security…
gvg
I’m sorry but this makes me LOL. Cheney is such a joke and I don’t think he knows it.
Is there any reason to believe Romney’s camp actually did anything to get this endorsement? I know they haven’t been very smart so far, but I do recall they have avoided Cheney before, also the unpopular govenor’s…I want to know if they have actually gotten stupider.
Even the base doesn’t like Cheney from what I have seen. A few odd individuals here and there, but that is all.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Violet:
More like the finger inside the puppet…
EzraRulz
I wish this post would be shouted from the rooftops.
Also, too, this belongs in Media Fail but I’ve sent this in to several journalists:
Will any journalist be brave enough to ask the Romney campaign a question/follow up regarding comments made by then candidate now presumptive nominee stating that he would look to Dick Cheney as a model for VP? Anyone? Seems like an excellent time now, since former VP hosted a fundraiser and endorsed him, yes?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/mitt-romney-dick-cheney-vice-president_n_964644.html
I know, I know, any/all GOPers get a pass on everything, but Rmoney is “running for office for pete’s sake!”
It is to weep.
geg6
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…
Number one on my bucket list is pissing on this motherfucker’s grave. I can’t wait until his bionic heart finally shorts out. I will swill champaigne, set off fireworks, and buy plane tickets to wherever they inter his rotting dessicated corpse.
NonyNony
@gvg:
As I recall he had a popularity rating of around 27% when he left office. And if anything it’s improved since he left office since people have short memories and have forgotten what an evil bastard the old vampire was.
Now granted all of those folks are solid Republican in their ideology, but it may motivate a few of them to turn out to vote instead of staying home. Especially because I believe that much of Cheney’s support towards the end of the Bush administration came from people who supported Cheney because he pissed off liberals.
tybee
@geg6:
i’d bet you’ll have to stand in line
Betty Cracker
@Tractarian: “Cracker” isn’t a racial slur where I come from. Fuller explanation of my particular use of it here.
WereBear
I’m basically pro-shock-collar for Cheney.
And anyone who wants a button can have one.
maya
@geg6:
Two words of advice for Dick Cheney – think cremation.
Roger Moore
@Davis X. Machina:
I’m not sure if it was quite that simple. The problem was that not everybody in the party saw the war as an opportunity to consolidate power. The direct financial benefits from the war were necessary to get important parts of the Republican machine to play along, and those other parts proved to be powerful enough to drag down the whole enterprise. Rove notwithstanding, the Republicans didn’t have the kind of machine that could pull off the kind of trick you’re talking about. They’re dominated by short-term thinkers who can’t concentrate beyond the next election or the next quarterly income statement. They lose track of the generational goal when there’s a big pot of money sitting in front of their faces.
mellowjohn
@NonyNony:
this time the demonstrators in the streets will be packing heat.
gnomedad
@amk:
No matter. ‘Shop them into a photo together. Let Mittster deny it happened. Could be entertaining.
mellowjohn
@maya: or plant him the way they did george pullman (just a few blocks from where i live):
doesn’t rule out pissing, tho.
Roger Moore
@maya:
I’m thinking that his grave will be safely located in an undisclosed location. It really would be the perfect end for him.
GxB
@geg6: Recall, 71 year old Dick “Dick” Cheney somehow got a new donor ticker – medical guidelines, oh those are just for the riff-raff.
THE BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IN THE WORLD*…
(*some restrictions apply)
Odie Hugh Manatee
Cheney, now powered by Breitbart!
There was no other heart lacking any semblance of humanity that would have been suitable for the Dark Lord. For those naysayers who say that the time between Breitbart’s death and Cheney’s new heart being bolted into place was too long, Cheney instructed the coroner who installed his heart to store it in a deep freeze for a couple of weeks to make sure that it was really dead and devoid of life.
Only then would Cheney’s body not reject it.
Southern Beale
Two headlines on the front page of today’s New York Times:
New York Fed Knew of False Barclays Reports on Rates
and
New Fraud Inquiry as JPMorgan’s Loss Mounts
Fuck all of the 9/11 fearmongering. How would a president Romney handle THESE stories? That should be the question dogging Our Man At Bain.
polyorchnid octopunch
I know this is nitpicking a bit, but I can’t help but point out that the US killed more like a million in that other war, not tens of thousands.
YellowJournalism
@maya: My uncle used to joke about dumping the cremated remains of his abusive stepdad into a toilet and peeing on them. Fitting for Cheney and easier for geg’s purposes!
sdhays
@dr. bloor: You beat me to it. Hilarious!
JCT
@amk: Yes, indeed they do, sometimes at an accelerated rate. He’s not free and clear.
Ruckus
The closest scale I can use to measure my disgust, dislike, distaste(and those words are not even close) for darth is that he is lower than dried snake shit in Death Valley on a summer day.
Knowing that he is still here makes me know there is no deity, or that he is a bigger asshole than darth. I could have gone several pleasurable lifetimes living as an intestinal parasite swimming in shit, if I was assured that no one as evil and despicable would have soiled the planet.
Trentrunner
*Piss* on Cheney’s grave?
Oh, no, my friend.
I have something much more substantial in mind.
Think: Soft-serve “chocolate” swirl. Steaming. Aromatic. Will help flowers flourish.
Ruckus
@Davis X. Machina:
Unfortunately, THIS
WereBear
@Odie Hugh Manatee: You have a great seed for a nice dark comic along those lines…
JR in WV
@Tractarian:
Dude,
Cracker means “southern red neck” not “person of a darker skin color” where I come from and where I have lived. West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Chicago, Philly, DC etc.
Do you really think Cole, the gigantic liberal, would allow a front page blogger on his blog to use a racist name?
Nah!
So go away and don’t bother us any more.
JR
Joey Maloney
Better still, every American should get a remote zapper in the envelope with his or her tax return.
Roy G.
@Southern Beale: Glad to see these stories are getting some traction in the press. The NYT’s financial reporters are among the few left there that do real reportage.
It looks like LIBOR is the Penn State of financial scandals, and Timmy Geithner is either Joe Paterno or Graham Spanier. Above all, rape is nothing compared to the reputations of these glorious institutions.
Mike G
What Darth meant was he can count on Rmoney to exploit a crisis to benefit of Repuke corporate cronies and shred individual rights. Which was pretty much Darth’s preoccupation after 9/11.
Ruckus
@Joey Maloney:
It should be a chain mail zapper. If we all got one the collective zap would stop that recycled death pump. With a chain mail zapper I get a zap then send it on to you and so on. That way he’d have to live through the zapping and we’d all get some little satisfaction. Personally I think it should have a monitor so that we could zap him in whatever passes for a sleep cycle. There could be a number of zappers, ten or twenty, the order of use done by lottery. I’ll bet that would be one lottery that sold out.
ETA It would be really funny to find out that W wanted a chance in that lottery.
shortstop
@mellowjohn: We are neighbors.
M.J.
Romney can take that endorsement straight to the bank – in the Caymans.
honus
And Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton. Back in the 60s, republicans were fond of pointing out that Lady Bird Johnson owned stock in the company that made Hueys. Cheney was the CEO of the primary war profiteer until the day he took office.
Ruckus
@honus:
What you’re saying is, We’ve already had business people in the highest office and how’d that work out?
John M. Burt
@mellowjohn: Some graves should be fitted with a dignified brass cuspidor, for the sake of public sanitation.
jayjaybear
@JR in WV: There are quite a few people who consider “cracker” to be racist against WHITES, which makes some sense if you refuse to factor in the last 300-odd years of racial relations in what was to become the USA. Of course, from a realistic standpoint, it’s bullshit. “Cracker”, “honky” and “whiteboy” are never going to come close to having the racial charge that “nigger” or even “colored” does, let alone just plain old “boy” used to address an adult African-American.
NCSteve
We already have a word. A perfectly good word that’s perfectly apt: “sociopath.”
Maude
Cheney was at 19% when he left office.
AxelFoley
SMH at Cheney
Damn, they’re not even trying anymore.
AxelFoley
@Maude:
LOL, damn he couldn’t even get 27%.
Ruckus
@AxelFoley:
27% may be completely crazy all the time but they aren’t completely stupid, all the time.
TenguPhule
No, but a good EMP pulse ensures the devil stays dead as his god intended.