VEEP FIGHT

What a great debate season this has been.

It took Cheney a whole fifty-nine words before he mentioned 9/11, which for him qualifies as being severely off-message. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he's still pimping the Saddam-al Qaeda connection, but there he was, shamelessly flogging away.

I was a bit nervous going in about how Edwards' spritely boyishness might appear next to Cheney's grumpy fatherishness, but was pleasantly surprised that Edwards seemed able to get his gravitas on, while pulling the neat trick of communicating optimism at the same time he was going after Cheney for his daministration's manifold failures.

No doubt about it, Cheney is a good debater. He never lets reality intrude on his version of the facts. I think it was pretty close to a draw last night, but I have to give it to Edwards because, well, Dick Cheney is a lying, crooked, mumbly old git.

My aversion to Dick Cheney goes back a ways, to the first Gulf War when he was Secretary of Defense and I was a senior in high school. There was just something about him that made me uncomfortable, a kind of workaday, ho-hum callousness that I found chilling, and still do. He wasn't a openly paranoid, authoritarian racist like Nixon, just a career bureaucrat, an apparatchik quietly and dutifully acting out the dictates of an ideology which I already knew then that I disliked.

I get the sense that Cheney is the type of fellow who has never, at least in the past twenty or so years, stopped to ask himself "Could I be wrong?" He takes it as a given that his political views are, have been, and will be correct, and thus no method is too shady to see those opinions translated into policy. Conservatives seem to find such lack of self-interrogation admirable, as always confusing stubbornness with steadfastness, ideology with principle.

I mean, come on, this is a guy without the moral sense to support a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela, and I'm very glad Edwards had a chance to bring that up. I suppose you could argue, as Jonah Goldberg tries to, that voting against an MLK holiday, as Cheney did, "reinforce[s] the image that Cheney is a man of conviction willing to buck politics for principle," but I think it only suggests that Dick Cheney simply has the wrong principles.

P.S. It so amuses me when conservatives try to argue that Edwards is somehow underqualified to assume the presidency. Have these jokers forgotten who their nominee was four years ago?