Via Tom Tomorrow, Digby once again displays her talent for perfectly articulating what the rest of us are thinking:
I know that I sound like a character in an Oliver Stone movie, (â€one pristine bullet? That dog don’t hunt!†) but I have never been sanguine about the fact that all the big money boyz and all the power brokers in the GOP traipsed down to Austin to meet that grinning moron and came away thinking he was the right choice to run the most powerful nation on earth. It makes far more sense to me that they wanted to install Cheney from the beginning (remember the energy task force?) and they needed an empty suit with a winning personality to actually run for the office. Maybe it really was a quiet coup, who knows?
It always seemed like Cheney’s “search” for the right VP candidate, before settling on himself (“I pick … ME!”), was a fairly quick and perfunctory affair. These days it’s easy to believe it was just the first of many Bush administration charades, like pretending to seek approval from the UN to invade Iraq, or that Bush is reading Camus or Tolstoy this summer. And it’s small consolation to know that one by one these charades will all be exposed to history, once their irreversible damage has been done.
Yeah, it’s so bad that we can’t even wish Bush would disappear, because THEN look what we’d get. What amazes me (I’m probably naive) is how B can keep putting on these shows of bravado and optimism in the face of it all. And Cheney trying to say he’s not a member of the executive branch? The more I hear the less I realize I understand, and that makes me really worry about the American electorate’s ability to understand ANYthing.
Hi Jane — you know, I’m actually going to repost a comment I made during an earlier thread, when Aaron and I were talking about pretty much the same thing.
At the time I wrote:
>>I sympathize with your fears of a Cheney presidency, but I don’t think there’s any danger of it (except to the extent that he’s already been president all this time). I think any impeachment that would remove Bush from office would be accompanied by impeachment for Cheney, and in fact Cheney would be removed first. There’s precedent for this: it happened with Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration. For more on that, see this DKos diary, which does a good job of explaining why impeaching GWB won’t lead to either a Cheney or a Pelosi presidency:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/23/103156/479
… so feel free to go ahead and fantasize. ; )