Raw Story has a scoop on a soon to be released Vanity Fair interview with Bush’s quail-hunting sidekick. I was shocked to hear that Cheney agreed to an interview with Vanity Fair because their editor, Graydon Carter has been a vociferous critic of this administration. Cheney helping his sales is an indication of just how desperate things have become.
The first interview with Vanity Fair took place in February, shortly after the Vice President accidently shot his 78-year-old hunting companion, which wasn’t reported to the press until the following afternoon. Purdum writes that the Administration is in “shambles,” and suspects that that’s partly why the Vice President agreed to chat with a “magazine whose editor’s criticisms of the administration are loathed by the vice president’s wife and elder daughter.”
Even though Cheney agreed to sit down twice with Todd Purdum, he wasn’t willing to answer all his questions on the record.
“Asked how he could have possibly objected to Senator John McCain’s amendment banning cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners and detainees in American custody, Cheney declines to answer on the record, because, his aides explain, the issue touches on sensitive, classified matters,” Purdum writes.
I don’t care whose perspective you look at, whether it be opponents of the Bush administration, Republican congresspeople up for re-election, or Bush himself, there is nothing further to be gained by Dick Cheney’s continued presence in the White House.
When you have an 18% approval rating, your chief of staff in on trial for perjury, you’ve just shot someone in the face, and the war you started has turned into a disaster, it’s time to step down.
The Vanity Fair article gives more evidence that Dick Cheney is responsible for the Iraq fiasco and for the bad intelligence that justified the war.
Also in the article, an unnamed former senior intelligence official tells Vanity Fair that Cheney’s relationship with the CIA turned sour with regards to whether or not Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
“But Cheney is not quite like any other vice president,” Purdum writes. “He runs a larger, more active national-security staff than any of his predecessors, and a former senior intelligence official told me that, while Cheney’s initial pre-war visits to ask the C.I.A. about Iraqi W.M.D. seemed supportive, the incessant demands of his staff to find evidence that wasn’t there became ‘probably a different matter.'”
Does anyone still believe that George Tenet told Bush the case for war was a ‘slam-dunk’? I don’t. I know he said those were the two dumbest words I ever said, but that was after he received a Medal of Freedom. And to contradict Woodward’s version would open up a big can of worms. In any case, when you have been exposed as a liar, as a warmonger, and as an incompetent…when your very visage turns off 82% of the voters and drags down your party’s prospects…when the whole world despises you, doesn’t trust you, and won’t work with you…you should just resign.
New information that Cheney was aware of the sensitivity of Plame’s position but wanted her name leaked anyway only bolsters the case for resignation.
It’s not even a partisan issue anymore. It’s no longer in any one’s interests, except Dick Cheney’s, for Big Time to continue in office.
