Don't Overestimate Dick Cheney

Perhaps I'm wrong, but, obviously I don't think so. I've long recoiled at the notion that we on the left shouldn't underestimate our political opponents, given that most of these guys are fucking morons. Maybe people who disagree with me see something that I don't. I don't see anything intimidating about stephen harper, or ezra levant or bush II, or any of them.

Case in point: Gary Leupp over at CounterPunch.org describes plodding failure Dick Cheney reduced to incoherence when Megyn Kelly of FAUX News mentions the unavoidable in the middle of Cheney's babbling about Iraq's present crisis:

Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating renewed U.S. military involvement in Ira to prevent a seizure of power by the al-Qaeda spin-off ISIS (or ISIL) and opining, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,”

Citing this comment, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly unexpectedly snapped, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well sir.” She referred specifically the false accusation about weapons of mass destruction used to sell the Iraq War. A flustered Cheney fumbled his interrogator’s name (“Reagan, um, Megyn”) before declaring, “You’ve got to go back and look at the track record.” (As though Megyn were doing something other than precisely that.) “We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction … Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to.”

Cheney's career has been built on the acquisition of raw power so as to compensate for his total lack of talent and ability. Whenever anything turned to shit (as it did again and again for him) he was able to rely on blatant bullying and corruption to see him through. If Cheney came upon genuine, sustained criticism, the rotten old shit would fall out of his chair and suffer a cardiac arrest.