Over the last several days, as I've watched the MSM resume its fawning mancrush over the awesome manliness that is Dick Cheney, I, like many of you, I'm sure, have been fighting off that once familiar urge to spit on the TV.  As Greg pointed out today, after yet another vicious attack by Cheney upon Obama was met with a mild jibe by the Robert Gibb, good ol' Chip Reid once again stepped up to defend poor, innocent, defensless Dick against Gibb's unprovoked bullying.  The way the Villagers get all gooshy over Cheney gives one a chilling insight into how utterly infantile and banal they have become.  Cheney was all about power, you see, unlimited, unconstrained, anger and fear fueled power. " Oh, he was oh so bad, but after all, isn't power what its all about?  Yes, we know he's bad but we just can't say away!" 

So its really not surprising that none of them have been able to still their racing pulses and compose themselves long enough to tell people the bleeding obvious truth about why Deadeye Dick's suddenly decided he needs another fifteen minutes of fame after eight years of open disdain for the limelight. 

As has been noted by many, Cheney famously never gave a rat's ass what anyone thought about him before now.  On the contrary, throughout his eight years as de facto chief of the secret police, he sneered -- well, okay, he sneers at everything.  But he took a perverse, one might even say perverted, pleasure in his abysmally low approval ratings.  One imagines Lavrenti Beria similarly relishing his unpopularity as evidence of how widely he is feared which, in turn, is proof that his is not a banal little brutish toad but is, instead, powerful and feared.  So it clearly was with Cheney.  He never gave a damn what anyone thought, took pleasure, even, in the disapproval, as in the case of his famous sneering "so?" when confronted with the fact that 2/3 of Americans thought the Iraq War wasn't worth fighting.

Now, however, he seems almost frantic in his urgent need to make people understand, to sympathize, to agree and, to stop hating the very sight of his brutal mug. Jumping from  podium to podium, explainging, warning, and, inevitably, snarling and making implied threats. 

So why does he care what people think of him now?  Why this sudden craving for approval and vindication?  And why is is daughter suddenly out there frantically trying to assist him?

Well its not because he's worried about his "legacy" and place in history as some of the MSM fawners insist. In his own twisted, narcissistic mind, he's convinced that he did the right thing, saved us from another attack and that he'll be vindicated.  It's certainly not that he thinks there's a snowball's chance in hell he can convince the country to go back to a policy that even Bush recoiled from during his second term. 

No.  The truth is clear to anyone who cares to look at it.  A lot it has been been put out there, a piece at a time, in the papers and on the blogs and, occaisionally, even on the teevee.  The reason he's out now, trying to rally support is because it is becoming increasingly obvious that he was, in fact, the mastermind and the man at the top of the whole foul exercise in institutionalised degeneracy.  He was the guy giving the orders.  He was the guy keeping track. 

And the reasons he was doing it are even uglier than we thought.  Sure, it seems evident that the policy was, at some level, driven by some deeply rooted megalomanical sickness that caused him to derive intense pleasure from knowing he could have people brutalized at will.  (One wonders how many of those now-destroyed tapes he watched.)   But that's just me and its justly dismissable as unprovable pop-psychology. No, I'm talking about two demonstrable reasons for the program.  The first is finally getting some media scrutiny--he wanted people tortured because he wanted to generate "evidence" to support the Al Qaeda-Saddam linkage and the WMD fantasy that he'd used to justify the war. 

The second reason for the torture program, however, is one whose terrible significance is being missed by the blogs and the MSM alike and may even be worse.

Liz and Dick (okay--just had an 'eeeyouu" moment) keep talking, while the MSM dutifully reverts to its proper role as stenographers, about how torturing Abu Zubaida, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Khalid Sheik Mohammed generated a great deal of actionable intelligence that disrupted terrorist plots in the making.  All the people who actually seem to know what they're talking about, however, say that all it generated were false leads, and that there's no evidence any terror attacks were disrupted due to torture-generated intelligence. We also know that the serial waterboarding  ended in 2004 after the breaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal finally made them believe there could be consequences.

Here's my point--when I put their false claims that actionable intelligence of imminent attacks was generated by the torture up next to the that the torture program ended in 2004, I can't help but notice that there was another signature event of the first Bush term that ended at about the same time.  I'm speaking, of course, of the frenetically shifting color coded threat scale that moved from yellow to red to orange to red to yellow to red again whenever Rove needed the media to change the subject.  (Some of you might recall Rep. Jim McDermott a psychiatrist in Fareinheit 911 charging that this was part of a deliberate campaign to make people feel crazy and, thus, dependent on the Bush heros to keep them safe.)  That nonsense finally stopped in 2004 when they pulled one--my recollection is that it was some Red Alert but only around the NYSE" ploy that was so obviously a political subject change that even the tame Village press went "oh come on!" 

So yeah, putting two and two together, it is hard to avoid the conjecture that, in addition to trying to force them to say there was an AQ-Iraq connection, they were torturing these guys because they generated the fuel for those sonorous warning of an imminent attack from John Ashcroft or Tom Ridge that always happened just in time to knock any bad news for Bush off the front page.  They were torturing these people, in short, to generate fear and fake news that would affect the 2002 and 2004 electoral campaigns.   And I think Cheney didn't give a damn whether it was true as long as they got their color change on schedule. 

But now, suddenly, all that's coming out--why he was torturing these guys and the fact that he was, in fact, the head fiend--not, Junior.  And there he sat in his private bunker, without that blanket pardon he'd always expected he'd get on the way out the door and suddenly people were saying scary things like "accountability," and "investigations" and worst of all, "prosecutions."  

And, just like that, it occurs to him that "guy actually responsible" + "most unviversally reviled and loathed political figure in the land" = "an orange jumpsuit and using cigarettes for currency."  Of course all the other skells are going to throw him under the train if the U.S. Attorney comes knocking.  He was, in fact, in charge and everybody hates him anyway.   

Its just that simple.  Cheney is not worried about his legacy and he has no illusions that he can change the administration's policy.  He's just worried about his own sorry ass, pure and simple, and what might happen to it if he ends up in some federal correctional facility. If he can just muddy the water and get his popularity raging higher than some other poor schmucks who was following his orders, maybe they'll throw one of them under the train when the accountability moment arrives rather than Dick.