Making Heads Explode

He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney. – Maureen Dowd

Ready to promote the release of his new autobiography, former Vice President Darth Cheney is deeply unapologetic over his time spent in serving in the Bush White House and can still give a rat’s ass about popularity over making the hard, adult decisions and doing the right thing:

“It’s important to have people at the helm who are prepared to be unpopular, to take the criticism and the hits that go with implementing policies.” “

Tuesday, I went down to Barnes & Noble to pick up former Vice President Dick Cheney’s just released autobiography, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. The cashier who checked me out said she and her coworkers were just talking about the book, wondering how well it would sell.

I’ve read a number of the reviews out- pretty much hostile and scathingly bitter, along with statements by Powell and Rice, reacting to Cheney’s criticism of them in the book. Even some Bush supporters are wincing.

This at HuffPo sums up MSMs reaction as well as any:

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Salon’s Glenn Greenwald recently criticized Cheney’s publicity tour on an episode of “The Last Word,” saying that the American public was wrong to welcome Cheney back into the spotlight so easily.

Hayes — filling in for Lawrence O’Donnell as host of the MSNBC show — said he found the book to be offensive and expressed disgust over Cheney’s “no regrets” stance on waterboarding terror suspects in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

“What’s so troubling is the fact that he has managed to escape not only legal sanction for advocating and overseeing the implementation of the war crime that is torture, but that he has appeared to manage to escape social sanction as well,” Hayes said.

Greenwald, a blogger, also expressed anger, claiming that Cheney was guilty of “among the most serious and egregious crimes committed over the last decade.”

My own opinion? I am an unapologetic admirer of Dick Cheney.

About the first 250 pages encompasses his time before serving as George W. Bush’s vice president. Photos of him hanging out with his grandchildren might be a bit too disarming and uncomfortable to those who wish to perceive and portray him as a Dark Lord of the Sith. For someone supposedly so inhuman and inhumane, he and his wife Lynne certainly have contributed enormously to charities.

What do you suppose your run-of-the-mill Hollywood limousine-learjet liberal would think about the photos? Judging by this:

Alec Baldwin tweeted, “Cover of Cheney’s book looks like he’s manning the velvet rope at the gates of Hell.” And then, “Cover of Cheney’s book looks like he’s maitre’d at the lounge in Hell. Table for how many?”

Probably would “make his head explode”. But as Cheney might shrug: “… the last thing on my mind is whether or not I am irritating Alec…who?”

Although I am getting a certain amount of sneerful satisfaction from liberal heads exploding over the release of Darth Cheney’s memoir.

Incidentally, as a side note, prior to Cheney’s memoir, another recent purchase I made was Glenn Carle’s The Interrogator, mentioned about in a previous post. You can read Ali Soufan’s review here, in the WSJ; Soufan is also set to release a book, I think 9/12. They, of course, are critics of the CIA EIT program, from an informed perspective.

Soufan’s book release is apparently being heavily redacted by the CIA and apparently for reasons beyond national security concerns.

In addition to Marc Thiessen’s book, Courting Disaster, in defense of the EIT program, next May will bring an additional voice to the ongoing debate:

A book scheduled for publication next May by José A. Rodriguez Jr., a former senior C.I.A. official, is expected to give a far more laudatory account of the agency’s harsh interrogations than that of Mr. Soufan, as is evident from its tentative title: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”