BREAKING: Cheney Has A Pulse

Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Larry King Live last night and said that Alberto Gonzales was a good man and there was nothing to the charges the Democrats have raised against him; that the war in Iraq is going well -- although (fetch the smelling salts) he admitted that he was wrong in 2005 to say the insurgency was in its "last throes" -- and he took a shot at Sen. Hillary Clinton, saying that he "agreed" with the letter from Eric Edelman at the Defense Department that Congressional oversight of the war was tantamount to treason. (This is in spite of the fact that Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote Ms. Clinton and essentially disavowed Mr. Edelman's outrageous claim.) And he reaffirmed the idea that he is a separate branch of the government.

What, you thought that under the intense grilling of Larry King (*snort*) Dick Cheney would break with the Bush administration's policies and views on Mr. Gonzales, the war, and the leading Democratic candidate? How could he? Mr. Cheney is the one who put all these policies in place. He's the one who told Gonzales to go to the hospital and wake John Ashcroft out of his medically-induced stupor and try to get him to sign off on the warrantless wiretapping program, the one that no one else in the Justice Department would support. Do you think that Mr. Bush had the cunning and the guile to come up with that plan? Of course not; it was too late at night, he'd already had his hot chocolate and num-nums, and he was waiting to find out what happens at the end of Goodnight, Moon.

Mr. Cheney says he has no recollection of issuing such an order, which is his way of saying "Of course I did, but I'm not going to tell you I did it," a lesson not lost on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. After all, in the land of loyal Bushies, accountability and the truth is strictly on a need-to-know basis.

The only reason that the Vice President appears on such softball programs like Larry King Live ("next up, Paris Hilton gives childrearing advice to Britney Spears") is that he needs to show his eminence in public every so often and to convey to the world with his calm benificence that black is white, up is down, and that is the way it is. No regrets, no doubts, no mistakes, and no questions.