Dick Dastardly and His Amazing Torture Machine

Cheney, Master of Pain
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 16, 2009

Dick Cheney is so comprehensively evil that Maureen Dowd has run out of villains to compare him to and has resorted to Hannah-Barbara cartoons of the 1970s.

Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest achievements.

And like the Snidlely Whiplash knock-off, Dick Dastardly Cheney has picked Nancy Pelosi to be his Penelope Pitstop. And like the lip-stick obsessed ingenue, Nancy engages in stereotypical female hopelessness.

Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time.

And we get a truly dastardly Alliteration Alert™ out of it.

That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.

And in a deeply veiled allusion we get our Movies With Maureen® Moment from the Harry Potter villains that doubles as a Dowdversion®.

The Bushies plied their dark arts in broad daylight.

And while Maureen is often slighted as being the dimmest bulb on the Times's Op-Ed Murderer's Row, she has clearly and unequivocally cut to the quick on what all this torture was about.

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Torture was never about saving American lives. It was about justifying Cheney's delusional paranoia. And that is truly dastardly.

Phantom Of The White House

Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

Rogue Diva of Doom
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 12, 2009

Sometimes Maureen Dowd gets a little carried away with her RudeNames® and epithets to the point of being too obscure. So here are the people she is really referring to in today's column.

Dick Cheney: Doomsday Dick, W.’s dark surrogate father

Rush Limbaugh: a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem

Colin Powell: a four-star general who spent his life serving his country

Sarah Palin: Rogue Diva (dethroned)

George W. Bush: W., Bush Junior

George Herbert Walker Bush: Bush 41, Poppy

Jeb Bush: the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother

In other Dowdisms, we get a Dowdversion™ (in addition to the sensible/scamp brother one above):

The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up.

And the Crossword Clue© Of The Week means lacking maturity or childish.

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

And in a major metaphor shift, Dubya has been accused at least three times of wrecking a symbolic car into either the globe, the global economy or diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf. Now we find that those weren't his hands on the wheel.

But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

And let's get this sneering face phantom off of his road show and back into his coffin.

The Goat, Or Who Is Cheney?

Cheney and the Goat Devil
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 17, 2009

Maureen Dowd loves a show and this weekend she rode the Megabus up to New York for an afternoon at Will Farrell's hit one-man valedictory to our recently departed Texan tinpot.

The audience for the Sunday matinee of “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W Bush” howled in delight.

Everybody loves to psychoanalyze our most dysfunctional and incompetent president of the 21st century and Maureen lets one of the show's writers, expound on the Arrested Development Theory.

“He’s so clearly a neglected 13-year-old that there’s something really kind of heartbreaking about him,” [Adam] McKay said, calling him “a good-time Charlie” who was “just used his whole life to front questionable business endeavors, and in a way that’s what his presidency was.

“He doesn’t have Cheney’s cartoonish need for power and greed that’s so off the charts you don’t even understand how Cheney got that way. W. may have some awareness, deep down inside, sort of like a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows he screwed up. I think Cheney not only knows but is delighted with everything he did, as is Rumsfeld.”

Maureen Dowd prefers the Oedipal Rebellion Theory, which is not entirely in conflict with the ADT.

One of the great mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether W. ever had an epiphany when he realized that he had been manipulated by Dick Cheney, whether it ever hit him that he had trusted the wrong father figure.

And that is the crux of Dubya Administration: What did the President know and when did Dick Cheney tell him?

Cheney as evil overlord and puppet master is such a popular meme that a Google Image search for "Cheney evil" brings up pages of the former Veep photoshopped as various villains or satanic figures. Here is my humble contribution to the genre.

The Will Farrell show also makes that connection:

In the show, the former president dismisses waterboarding as a spa treatment at Bliss, and reveals that he did walk in on Cheney once in the basement of the White House locked in the amorous arms of a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams.

“He looked at me with solid silver glowing orb-like eyes, and his breath had a strong ammonia scent to it,” Ferrell’s W. said. “And he told me in a language that I knew in my heart hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years ‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ And I just ran.”

‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ as far as I can tell is just pidgen-Lovecraft used out of fear of using an actual invocation out of the Necronomicon and summoning Chtulhu or one of the other Ancient Ones now that Cheney has released them from their bidding.

In Maureen's one concession that Dubya may have grown a spine sometime during his reign of error, she uses the rather minor incident of Scooter Libby's (and just having the nickname 'Scooter' should be a criminal offense) pardon, or the lack thereof.

By not pardoning Cheney’s alter ego, who plied his dark arts trying to discredit Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and then lied to protect his boss, W. was clearly saying he thought that Libby, and by extension Cheney, did something wrong.

But Maureen doesn't go as far as attributing the Dumb-Ass Dauphin with moral clarity as much as pre-adolescent stubborness.

But it’s not clear whether W. is simply pouting because Cheney’s machinations blackened his legacy, or if, at long last, he fathoms the morality of it, that Cheney did hideous things to the Constitution — not to mention that goat devil.

Let's just hope Joe Biden can clear the Naval Observatory from the lingering sulfurous stench of burn-out brimstone.

All The President's Minions

America spells competition, join us in our blind ambition
Get yourself a brand new motor car
Someday soon well stop to ponder what on earths this spell we’re under
We made the grade and still we wonder who the hell we are.

-“The Grand Illusion”, Styx

An Extremist Makeover?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 10, 2009

As the Bush Administration acolytes do their Legacy Lap around the Georgetown Cocktail Party Circuit, Maureen Dowd has been detecting a certain sulfurous odor which she finally places.

In the past week, I’ve twice been close enough to Dick Cheney to kick him in the shins.

Or to blast him the face with a shotgun, but the Secret Service would probably not look kindly on that. At the first incident, she used a Dowdversion® to highlight the irony of Cheney invoking the document he spent so much time undermining.

The first time was Tuesday, when Cheney left the ceremony where he gave the oath of office to senators. {snip} I thought it gave the ceremony a satirical edge to have the lawless Vice presiding over lawmakers swearing to support and defend the Constitution that he soiled and defiled — right in the heart of the legislative branch he worked to diminish.

Within the snip is a comic metaphor that is a tribute to a movie genius.

The senators seemed thrilled, especially Joe Biden, who was getting sworn in for just two weeks and was excitedly showing off a family Bible the size of a Buick.

As the ever-observant nytpicker caught, Woody Allen had writ it three decades earlier.

"Honey, there's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick."
-Alvy Singer, "Annie Hall," 1977

But that is not the only Movies With Maureen® moment we get. Dick Cheney himself claims that his villainous reputation is overstated.

He went on to seriously assert that his image as “a private, Darth Vader-type personality” has been “pretty dramatically overdone.”

The Darth Cheney meme is so ‘overdone’ that if you do a Google Image Search simply for “Cheney”, two different photoshops of Dick as the evil overlord make the first page of results.

But no Dr. Evil is without his minions. Maureen found them within the Cheney entourage and identifies them by Rude Name®.

The second time I crossed paths was Thursday night, at a glitzy party at Cafe Milano for Brit Hume, stepping down as a Fox anchor. It required extreme defensive maneuvers — much zigging and zagging — to avoid Cheney, Wolfie and Rummy, all three holding court and blissfully unrepentant about the chaos they’ve unleashed on the world.

Maureen uses fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Woodward to confirm the incredulity of the spinning going on.

“My conscience is clear,” Rummy volunteered to Bob Woodward, talking about how he’s interviewing people for his memoir.

Woodward was stunned. “I was as speechless as I was in July 2006 when I interviewed him and he said he was not a military commander, that he could make the case that he was ‘by indirection, two or three steps removed,’ ” Woodward told me afterward.

And that reminds Maureen of yet another movie villain.

At least Ernst Stavro Blofeld would have the decency just to leave the scene.

And Dowd shares some derision for Dubya for whom she goes Double Dowdversion™ on.

From Gaza to the unemployment figures to the $10.6 trillion debt, things keep spiraling while W. keeps fiddling. Just as when he was in the National Guard and didn’t bother to show up, now, as the scabrous consequences of his missteps shake the economy and the world, he doesn’t bother to show up.

Maureen tries to make “biking through Katrina” the Bush version of “fiddling while Rome burns”.

After he leaves office, W. wants to go on more bike rides, because biking through Katrina was not enough.

She first tried out this metaphor last February when she said:

How could the “compassionate conservative” bike through Katrina?

But like “fetch” from Mean Girls, it just isn’t happening. But back to Cheney, she combined a Rude Name® with an Alliteration Alert® to catalog his Big Lies.

The vamoosing Vice has no apologies about turning America into a country that tortured; indeed, he denies it ever happened. “Torture,” he told [Fred] Barnes, “that word gets thrown around with great abandon.”

And a certain classic rock tune is evoked as Cheney continues to dissemble.

“I think we made good decisions,” he told [Mark] Knoller, adding with even grander delusion, “I think we knew what we were doing.”

And the key to a grand illusion is that the audience can't see the puppeteer perform his tricks or the ventriloquist's sneering lips move.

He protested “the notion that somehow I was pulling strings or making presidential-level decisions. I was not. There was never any question about who was in charge. It was George Bush. And that’s the way we operated. This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened.”

As in the Star Wars saga, there are always two Sith Lords, a master and an apprentice.

The fact that Cheney is now putting all the blame for all the messes squarely on W. shows once more how the bureaucratic master outmaneuvers his younger partner.

Even on his way out, Vice is still on top.

Only if by "on top", you mean morassed in an unending unnecessary war with the economy in shambles. If that was Dick's goal, then he definitely gets to fly the Mission Accomplished banner and Dubya gets to be the stooge stuck with the blame.

By George, By Jeeves

American President Pleads Guilty to Hopeless Idealism
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 18, 2008

Maureen Dowd continues her European romp with Dubya and the next stop is Britain where we still have an ally, for the time being. Like the langoustes of the last column, she obsesses over the menu:

Maybe he was excited by the prospect of sharing some Gloucestershire beef, Yorkshire pudding and fruit trifle with a world leader more unpopular than he is.

Dubya’s relationship with recent prime ministers has been complicated and Maureen trots out a pack of canine metaphors.

Britain is still smarting about being cast as poodle to W.’s pit bull…

Which she then randomly mixes the metaphor into Dubya as some sort of avian predator.

If Mr. Brown had any thought of promoting himself as the anti-poodle with some arm’s length body language, W. swiftly disabused him. He spread his wingspan to draw in Gordon and Sarah, and then clasped Gordon so heartily around the shoulders that the Brit was forced to grab W.’s waist in a shy embrace as they entered the building.

In another attempt to draw a parallel, she reaches for British farce and compares Bush and Brown with P. G. Wodehouse’s comic duo:

Poppy Bush was often compared to Bertie Wooster, and W. seems to have found his own stiff-backed Jeeves. Mr. Brown agreed to send more troops to Afghanistan, put more sanctions on Iran and decide on Iraq troop withdrawals based on conditions on the ground.

First off, Maureen, that was YOU that compared Poppy to Bertie. From a 1995 column titled “The Impression of Green”:

The last Administration was run by Bertie Wooster of Kennebunkport and filled with Top-Sidered Anglophiles.

That aside, in the Jeeves stories, the genial doofus Bertie is constantly having his hare-brained schemes pulled out of the fire by his preternaturally clever manservant. Dubya IS a unaware self-involved bumbling idiot, but Gordon Brown is hardly any genius in disguise and none of their plans have turned into surprise successes. Like most Dowd metaphors, I’m not sure it stands up to much scrutiny beyond its initial quasi-literary recognition value.

Dowd did unveil a new RudeName® for the veep, presumably inspired by the water-drip torture of the continuing leaks over who authorized what in our quest to extract a pound of aggressively interrogated flesh from the enemy combatants we captured.

Or perhaps after working with Torquemada Cheney all these years, W. simply feels more at home in a monarchy.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but this metaphor was a little more left-field than usual. Dowd Report correspondent yellojkt did the Torquemada thing much better back when befuddled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was still around.

But Cheney is invoked in the column to rebut one of Dubya’s favorite strawmen:

He said … “There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal,” he asserted, adding that he rejected as elitist the notion that “maybe it’s only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self-government.”

The subject-verb agreement mangled “some” in this case are as nebulous as most of Maureen’s anonymous sources, but she gets in one last zinger.

If there’s one thing W. and Cheney have proved, beyond a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, it’s that at least two white-guy Methodists are not capable of self-government.

Maybe spreading democracy, like charity, should begin at home.

Witchcraft and Statecraft

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
-Macbeth, Act V, scene v

Toil and Trouble
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 9, 2008

Maureen Dowd is feeling very Shakespearean lately and clearly obsessed with black magic. She recently called Hillary Clinton Lady Voldemort, which is clearly a portmanteau of Lady Macbeth and the villain from the Harry Potter series. Today she more explicitly compares the war in Iraq to Macbeth’s sorcery filled tale.

Maybe it was because I was sitting in the back of the Senate chamber with three war protesters — grim-faced, chanting women dressed in black hooded cloaks, white makeup and blood-red hands — that I felt as though I were watching a production of “Macbeth” rather than a hearing on Iraq.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” the witches in the play said. “Hover through the fog and filthy air.” (Act I, scene i)

General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were first called The Surge Twins (as opposed to the Glimmer Twins) back on September 12, 2007 (just a week before yours truly began documenting Dowd’s pop cultural fascination with Rude Names®). They are back for an encore:

The Surge Twins were back, but the daylong testimony of David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker before two committees seemed more depressing this time. As the Bard writes in “Macbeth”: “From that spring whence comfort seemed to come, discomfort swells.” (Act I, scene ii)

That’s two quotes from the first act. I don’t know if she is saving the rest of the play for a later column or if that is just as far as she got before getting tired of the sophomore English conceit. And I know Dowd doesn’t know enough comic books to make a deliberate Green Lantern reference, but I read this as “guardians of Oa” the first time I read it:

The guardians of Iraq offer more of the same — a post-Surge Pause or “consolidation and evaluation,” as the general generically puts it — and no answers about how we can stop our ward from aligning with our enemy.

And I have no idea whether a post-Surge Pause is anything like menopause, but they both seen to be rather chaotic events.

I’m not sure what Dowd has against the senator from California, but she gives her props here:

You know you’re in trouble when Barbara Boxer is the voice of reason.

“Why is it,” she asked, “after all we have given — 4,024 American lives, gone; more than half-a-billion dollars spent; all this for the Iraqi people, but it’s the Iranian president who is greeted with kisses and flowers?”

She warmed to: “He got a red-carpet treatment, and we are losing our sons and daughters every single day for the Iraqis to be free. It is irritating is my point.”
Ambassador Crocker dryly assured the senator from California that he believed that Dick Cheney had also gotten kissed on his visit to Iraq.

Cheney may have gotten kissed, but it’s the American people that are getting screwed.

Dowd Declares War On Iran

Maureen Dowd's sense of sarcasm is a little subtle and something got lost in translation. Al Kamen of the Washington Post reports that an English language Iranian news agency picked up Dowd's mock-Cheney interview and passed them along as dire warnings of more American sabre rattling. Someone must have tipped them off, because the report go quickly buried. According to Kamen:

It seems New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd brought us closer to the brink with a Sunday column in which she purported to interview Vice President Cheney. This is how it played on Press TV, the first international Iran-based news network to broadcast 24-7 in English.

"Cheney: Iran has WMDs, just like Iraq," said the headline on the online edition, posted Sunday.

"The US Vice President, Dick Cheney, has accused the Islamic Republic of having weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 'just like Saddam,' " the story read.

"While the negotiations are underway between Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog, the hawkish US official said the White House considers Iran's nuclear dossier in 'the final stages of diplomacy,' " the report said.

" 'We are not going to get hung up on democracy this time,' Dick Cheney said in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. 'It's time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them,' said the Vice President, when asked how close Washington was to launching military strikes on Iran. "

Note that the Iranians confuse Tim Russert with a New York Times reporter. All these MSM types look alike. Kamen continues:

The item was no longer on the site yesterday, maybe because someone realized Cheney would no more sit down and chat with Dowd than he would with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Chatting with us yesterday, Dowd noted that satire has its risks.

Ya think?

According to National Review Online mediablog, this is not the first time that an Iranian news agency has picked up Dowd's commenting as reporting. Her earlier Cheney as Madman column (and they are beginning to get hard to keep straight). The NRO spin is nicely summarized in the title Islamic Regime’s New Pin-up Girl: Maureen Dowd. It goes on to say:

First Maureen Dowd writes a piece of agit-prop against the American government, and it is published in The New York Times yesterday under the title “Madness as Method.”

Then today, the Islamic Republic News Agency – one of the propaganda arms of the Iranian regime, and an outlet that has helped Ahmadinejad deny the Holocaust – repeats much of Dowd’s column almost verbatim (although without Dowd’s by line)

The Iranian version of her column is online here. I hope Maureen is getting royalties from all these reprints.

OMG! Cheney on MTP

W.M.D. in Iran? Q.E.D.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 28, 2007

Quod erat demonstrandum: a Latin phrase used at the end of a definitive proof

This week, Maureen Dowd’s dental fillings are picking up a Meet The Press episode that hasn’t happened yet.

RUSSERT: How close are we to war with Iran?
CHENEY: Well, I think we are in the final stages of diplomacy, obviously. We have done virtually everything we can with respect to carrots, if you will. It’s time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them.
RUSSERT: Isn’t Secretary Rice still pushing carrots for Iran?
CHENEY: The more carrots Condi feeds ’em, the better they’ll be able to see the bombs coming.

Dowd must be on a truly strange diet because she has become obsessed with vegetables. She has mentioned using carrots as a motivator with Iraq back during In A Dinner Jacket’s speech and earlier this week as well. The vegetable stew recall Condoleezza Rice’s testimony that the smoking gun in Iraq could be a mushroom cloud.

Another Dowd fascination is with the career backgrounds of Middle-Eastern dictators. She dismissed Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an engineer with PhD, as a traffic planner.

CHENEY: Syria is not a country, Tim. It’s a way station run by an eye doctor.

Sure enough, according to Wikipedia, Syrian hereditary president Bashar al-Assad has an ophthalmology degree. Dowd’s preoccupation with mocking the previous jobs of politicians is intriguing. If being an engineer or doctor isn’t good enough to run a country, what is? Actor? Rancher? Housewife? Journalist?

We then get a brief lesson in the 20th century handling of dangerous dictators.

CHENEY: Why don’t we just give the Islamofascists Sudetenland, Tim? Peace in our time.
RUSSERT: The Europeans are upset that you might start another war in their backyard.
CHENEY: (Rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath) Eurappeasers.

Both Sudetenland and Eurappeasers evoke the efforts of pre-World War II European leaders to satiate Hitler’s lust for territory. The Sudetenland was a part of Czechoslovakia that Hitler really, really wanted. ImaginaryCheney here has clearly lost the debate by invoking Godwin’s Law.

CHENEY: You really want Rudy Giuliani playing with the nuclear button, Tim? Now, that’s insane.

According to Dowd, Cheney is going to be the insane Slim Pickens riding the bomb down to Tehran. That must make Rudy President Merkin Muffley.

Dowd Live At Harvard

Updated: 10/27/07

Photo credit: Crimson/Alexandra P. Kass

According to the Harvard Crimson, Maureen Dowd gave a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government yesterday extolling the need for an active press to rein in the “alternate realities” pushed by the White House among others. She credits Dubya with providing job security:

“At a time when journalism is considered an endangered species,” Dowd said, “the Bushies at least have proved that our profession is more necessary than ever.”

Dowd’s speech, filled with incisive one-liners, spanned a wide range of topics, from the current war in Iraq to Shakespeare’s “Othello” to the presidential campaign of comedian Stephen Colbert, who wrote for her column earlier this month.

She also invoked Star Wars like she did from Sunday's Madness tirade:

[Cheney] has even begun referring to his nickname, Darth Vader, noting that it “is one of the nicer things I’ve been called recently.”

And at Harvard:

Speaking about Vice President Dick Cheney, she remarked, “Darth Vader is shaking his fist at Iran now. What could be more Shakespearean than that?”

Which proves that my Hamlet explication was spot on and I would love to find out what the Othello call-out was. Her speech further shows how dexterous she is at switching from The Bard to The Force.

Update: As if she heard me, Libby Hughes of Cape Cod Today goes into further details on the Othello reference in Dowd's speech.

Dowd compared the politics of the White House to a Shakespearean drama, full of sex and envy. She cast Dick Cheney in the role of Iago ( without charm) in the play "Othello." She alluded to Cheney as devious and Rummy as Darth Vader. She noted the political dynasties of the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes, and probably--Clintons. She wondered whether it will be Hillaryland or Rudyville in 2009. "If Rudy Guiliani is a Red Sox fan, anything is possible." She briefly compared Barack Obama to Adlai Stevenson for his self-image as "no image." Dowd also had taken a swipe in her column at Obama's big ears and discovered she had hit a vulnerable chink in Obama's armor.

The Barack/Adlai comparison comes from her Schlesinger review. Look for the Othello allusion, the dynasty comparison, and the Red Sox Rudy line in future columns.

Riding The Crazy Plane

Madness as Method
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 24, 2007

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
-Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206

Today, Maureen Dowd levels her shotgun at Dick Cheney but with a wide spread takes on plenty of other familiar targets.

Dick Cheney’s craziness used to influence foreign policy.

Now it is foreign policy.

He may have lost his buddy in belligerence, Rummy. He may have tapped out the military in Iraq. He may not be able to persuade Congress so easily anymore — except for Hillary — to issue warlike resolutions.

According the the UK Telegraph:

[Senator Clinton] was the only Democratic candidate who voted for a resolution last month that called on Mr Bush to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group.

Clinton’s position on Iran lets her get pilloried on both the left and the right as Dowd later points out:

Rudy is using his more martial attitude toward Iran as a weapon against Hillary, painting her as a delicate ditherer on the topic.

And delicate ditherer is both our Alliteration of the Afternoon and a new Hillary epithet fitting with the Hamlet reference in the title. But the main thrust of the article is that not only does Cheney, as the biggest of the chickenhawks, want to bomb Iran, he’s crazy enough to do it.

Cheney seems to enjoy giving the impression that he is loony enough to pull off an attack on Iran before leaving office — even if he has to do it alone, like Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in “Dr. Strangelove” to the sentimental tune of “We’ll Meet Again.”

Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb is a Stanley Kubrick black comedy classic about a rogue Air Force officer that starts a nuclear showdown with the old Soviet Union. It’s full of classic ironic quotes like:

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.

Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!

Ambassador de Sadesky: Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
President Merkin Muffley: This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.
Ambassador de Sadesky: Our source was the New York Times.

See, even in the movies, the Times is undermining national security.

And then we start getting some callbacks like a stand-up comedian.

The neocons who have their heart set on bombing Iran to stop I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket and the mullahs from getting nuclear capability were thrilled and emboldened by the placid reaction to the Israeli air strike on Syria.

That is, of course, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose Couric-inspired nickname you will remember from the fruitbat column. That column also used a carrot and stick metaphor that gets trotted out again.

In his new book, the former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton scornfully accuses Colin Powell, and later Condi Rice, of appeasing Iran, including some carrots to get them to cease their nuclear plans.

Hit with sticks, the bogyman responded with sticks. He said that Iran will not negotiate with anyone about its right to nuclear technology.

And even though Dowd invokes Slim Pickens in the Dr Strangelove reference, the better comparison is to General Jack D. Ripper who says:

[Clemenceau] said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Substitute “Communist” with “IslamoFascist” and “bodily fluids” with “oil resources” and I think you have Cheney’s next speech, right before the rogue B-52s head for Tehran.

Chicanery and The Man

Bomb, Bomb Iran
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 10, 2007

John McCain has been captured on YouTube singing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys.

Emboldened by her tour de farce in her Schlesinger schtick, Maureen Dowd unleashes an air assault of alliterations. A Democrat heckling Hillary falls into MoDo’s modus operendi.

A Democrat, Randall Rolph, asked Senator Clinton why he should back her when she did not learn her lesson after voting to authorize W. to use force in Iraq. He did not understand how she could have voted yea to urge W. to label Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, possibly setting the stage for more Cheney chicanery.

"Cheney chicanery" is verbal shorthand nothing short of genius that covers a wide range of dubious deceptions. He was one of the most vocal proponents of the Weapons of Mass Destruction meme and the Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection wishful thinking. Veep Vader has been itching to invade Iran for some time.

Hillary’s hawkish Iran vote was an ill-advised move, especially given her private view that Cheney is untrustworthy and given Sy Hersh’s New Yorker report claiming that Cheney had pushed to devise a plan to attack the Revolutionary Guard facilities in Iran.

Hillary voted for the resolution to use force against Iraq along with other warhawks, chickenhawks, and party hackhawks. Many, including Dowd think this was a political act designed to inoculate this distaff senator against charges of softness. As the war has become more unpopular, Clinton has had to spend more and more time telling the tale of the albatross around her neck.

When Hillary voted to let W. use force in Iraq, she didn’t even read the intelligence estimate. She wasn’t trying to do the right thing. She was trying to do the opportunistic thing. She felt she could not run for president, as a woman, if she played the peacenik.

Playing the peacenik would fall into the Republican plan to paint her as pawn of her draft-dodging partner.

And once Dowd runs out of consonants to confuse she returns to the “verb-up” formula she found so hip a few columns ago:

It was odd, given her success in the debates conveying the sense that she is the manliest candidate among the Democrats, that she felt the need to man-up on Iran.

And so ends another amazingly alliterative sarcastic salvo of Hillary hatin'.