Cheney Roundup

I caught David Letterman’s monologue last night for the first time in months. You know that the idea of a Vice President for Torture is established in the public mind when a late night comic jokes about Cheney having his Thanksgiving turkey tortured by the CIA. Unfortunately, I fear that despite the supposed resurgence of “moral values”, opposition to torture is not a winning political strategy with the US public.

In any case, Dick Cheney’s recent emergence from his undisclosed location to growl at opponents of the administration’s Iraq fiasco has sparked various responses in the blogs:

• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber objects to Cheney’s latest rationale for being in Iraq, on the grounds that the conditions Cheney is complaining about didn’t exist before the invasion and in fact were a direct result of it.
• Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo catches our “liberal” Washington Post applying the media’s usual false balance to the lie by Cheney (and Republicans all over the media) that Democrats in Congress saw the same intelligence that the administration did in the leadup to the war — even though the lie had previously been called out by the Post itself.
• Speaking of lies, John in DC at Americablog is one of many bloggers taking the occasion of Cheney’s latest statements to remind us about Rep. Henry Waxman’s database of administration lies about Iraq.

Update (2:30pm): Dana Milbank, who was criticized here a while back, gets in a few jabs at Cheney today. I like the opening:

Vice President Cheney protested yesterday that he had been misunderstood when he said last week that critics of the White House over Iraq were “dishonest and reprehensible.”

What he meant to say, he explained to his former colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, was that those who question the White House’s use of prewar intelligence were not only “dishonest and reprehensible” but also “corrupt and shameless.”

It was about as close as the vice president gets to a retraction.