Dick Cheney's weekend TV appearance has received a good deal of comment, and rightly so. Both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post ran good analytical articles on Monday. Josh Marshall, who has made Cheney's influence on the Bush Administration a special object of his attention, did a good take-down of one of Cheney's more outrageous claims. Cheney's misrepresentations were so bad that even the Democrats were willing to challenge him directly.
Two of the bogus stories the Vice President used were the rumored meeting of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, and the claim that two canvas-sided trailers found in Iraq used to make hydrogren gas were actually mobile labs for making chemical or biological weapons. And by "bogus", I don't mean they are "thinly sourced" or something like that. They have been publicly, convincingly debunked.
I can think of three possible interpretations to put on Cheney's approach, from least scary to most.
One is that he knows that Iraq policy is in big trouble. But he figures that the best way to hang on to public opinion as much as possible is to keep repeating the same prewar arguments and hope not too many people will notice.
A second is that he's just too arrogant, stubborn and self-righteous to admit he made mistakes.
A third is that he doesn't know he's lying. That would imply that the process of "groupthink" has become acute in the Bush Administration, with a small group of decision-makers reinforcing each others' preconceptions and closing out conflicting information and opinions.
I'm assuming #2 is the case for now. Because #3 is too scary. And the first doesn't seem to be consistent with Cheney's interview Sunday. If you know you've gotten caught hawking bogus claims, why go on repeating two of the most ridiculous ones? That's more likely to further undermine credibility rather than reinforce it.
Consistency has its virtues. But it's not the same as stubbornness, although this Administration has often been able to substitute the later for the former.
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