Oh, Dick, you bitch!

The Dark Lord of Torture gave a speech on Wednesday: Vice President's Remarks at the Frontiers of Freedom Institute 2005 Ronald Reagan Gala (As Prepared for Delivery) 11/16/05 White House Web site.

In the opening to the speech he welcomed a few dignataries.  Then he said:

I'm sorry that we couldn't be joined by Senators Harry Reid, John Kerry, or Jay Rockefeller. They were unable to attend due to a prior lack of commitment.

Yes, he said "lack of commitment".  It sounds like the Dark Lord is a little pissy these days.

Maybe it's his time of the month.  Or maybe it's because he's used to operating in the dark.  And now he's under unprecendented (for him) scrutiny.  And at the same time, he's politically radioactive, what with his approval ratings about as low as Satan's.

Meanwhile, the newly sensitive Dark Lord of Torture is shocked, shocked at the things people are saying about him and Dear Leader Bush!  Try to believe Dick Cheney would have actually said all this (my emphasis):

As most of you know, I have spent a lot of years in public service, and first came to work in Washington, D.C. back in the late 1960s. I know what it's like to operate in a highly charged political environment, in which the players on all sides of an issue feel passionately and speak forcefully. In such an environment people sometimes lose their cool, and yet in Washington you can ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate. But in the last several weeks we have seen a wild departure from that tradition. And the suggestion that's been made by some U. S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of this Administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.

And then he presents his own version of the "that were stupid enough to believe us so what right do they have to criticize us now?" position that's the current Party line:

Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing force against Saddam Hussein. These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence, and were free to draw their own conclusions. They arrived at the same judgment about Iraq's capabilities and intentions that was made by this Administration and by the previous Administration. There was broad-based, bipartisan agreement that Saddam Hussein was a threat ... that he had violated U.N. Security Council Resolutions ... and that, in a post-9/11 world, we couldn't afford to take the word of a dictator who had a history of WMD programs, who had excluded weapons inspectors, who had defied the demands of the international community, who had been designated an official state sponsor of terror, and who had committed mass murder. Those are facts.

Of course, it was the Bush administration and Dick Cheney, not the Democrats or that evil, evil Bill Clinton who were claiming that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program.  In fact, the Dark Lord himself claimed just before the invastion that Saddam had "reconstituted" nuclear weapons.  If I'm not mistaken, that particular whopper was unique to him.

And I just can't help but notice that none of that stuff the Dark Lord lists - Saddam was sneaky and so forth - were in that war resolution that Congress passed and the Torture Administration is now using to try to beat the war critics over the head with.  The resolution required the Torture Administration to show: (1) that there was no possibility of dealing with Iraq's (entirely non-existent) "weapons of mass destruction" through measures short of war; and (2) that they show that the war effort would not detract from the effort to pursue anti-American terrorist groups, including specifically those who attacked the US on 9/11/05.

It's perfectly legitimate to criticize Congress for not enforcing their own war resolution, which the Torture Administration so clearly violated by initiating the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.

But the Dark Lord didn't say that.  He says Democrats are traitors who hate our soldiers, unlike the administration who sent them off to a preventive war of choice to get rid of WMDs that didn't exist.  Oh, and Democrats are wimps and stuff.  To steal some phrasing from the Daily Howler, just try to imagine that Dick Cheney actually would say this stuff:

What we're hearing now is some politicians contradicting their own statements and making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war. The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out. American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures - conducting raids, training Iraqi forces, countering attacks, seizing weapons, and capturing killers - and back home a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie. (my emphasis)

Well, Dark Lord, there weren't any of those nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-related programs or all those other nasty WMDs that you as much as anyone kept saying were there without doubt.

The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone - but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history. We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them. And far more important, we're going to continue sending a consistent message to the men and women who are fighting the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other fronts. We can never say enough how much we appreciate them, and how proud they make us. They and their families can be certain: That this cause is right ... and the performance of our military has been brave and honorable ... and this nation will stand behind our fighting forces with pride and without wavering until the day of victory. (my emphasis)

That's good to hear.  The goal of the war was to deal with Iraq's WMDs.  There aren't any there.  Time to declare victory and bring them home.  But something tells me that's not what the Dark Lord of Torture meant.

The Dark Lord is a real piece of work, no doubt about that.

But operating in the light of day, much less under close scrutiny from the press, the public and that annoying special counsel investigating his and Scooter's outing of an undercover CIA agent, is just not his preferred style.

In Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004), James Mann describes the Dark Lord's role during the Reagan administration in exercises practicing for "continuity of government" in the case of a nuclear attack.  He didn't just start departing for those "undisclosed locations" when he became Vice President:

At least once a year during the 1980s, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was still working diligently on Capitol Hill, and Rumsfeld remained a hard-driving business executive in Chicago. Yet for three or four days at a time, no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Rumsfeld's offices locate him. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number through which they might relay messages in case of emergencies.

After leaving their day jobs, Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man, joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and a single member of Ronald Reagan's cabinet, separately slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a discarded military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear made its way to the same location.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal figures in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan administration. Under it, the administration furtively carried out detailed planning exercises to establish a new American "president" and his staff, outside and beyond the specifications of the U.S. Constitution, in order to keep the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Over the years a few details about the existence of this Reagan-era effort have come to light, but not the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld.

This is the way Dark Lord Cheney prefers to operate: in secret, without scrutiny of the press or the public or Congress, even beyond the reach of the law if that can be arranged.

Mann also gives a telling analysis of how those exercises illustrate an important point about both Cheney and his longtime associate Rummy:

[T]heir participation in the Reagan-era exercises demonstrated a broader underlying truth about Cheney and Rumsfeld: Over three decades, from the Ford administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never too far away; they stayed in touch with it defense, military and intelligence officials and were regularly called upon by tose officials. [Rummy's now-infamous trip to Baghdad to court Saddam Hussein for the Reagan administration is a good example.]  Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which presidents may come and go, but America always keeps on fighting. (my emphasis)

And now we see what happens when they get to run the country the way they've always wanted to.  But now they're pretty teed off at having to deal with all this democracy nonsense after people saw what kinds of disasters they had created, especially in Iraq.