Naturally, if you read the MSM or watched TV, you’d have missed this priceless moment, which I have to say, in my unprejudiced opinion, was first time I saw President Obama pretty much be an arrogant asshole. Helen, with her uncomfortable truth, cracked the code, and while I suddenly liked my President, whom I supported and continue to support, albeit intermittently these days, a lot less, my crush on Helen only got worse.  So I typed.

Behold the following, which may be slightly better written than Gov. Sanford’s work, but is essentially the same thing.

Dear Ms. Thomas,

Amid the maelstrom over the deeply compromised folks over at the WaPoo and Politico whining about how uppity “bloggers” were taking over the Obama press conferences, it brought a smile to my face that you so ably disrupted the scripted operetta with your question about the torture photos.

As usual, and I don’t mean to insinuate that you do it deliberately, you made your “colleagues” look like the motley peanut gallery of fawning, social-climbing nincompoops that they are.

Thanks again, for reviving for me the fading memory of what journalism was intended to be.

Glad to see you back at your game.

Cocktailhag

Her response?

Kind words- We are being treated like trained seals. helent

Today’s the day.  We should all stand with Helen against torture.  Some seals can’t be trained.

Of course, they were the same  stories he’s been telling for years, and pretty much no one on the planet believes, but the Politico boys just never get tired of this stuff.  Pity their readers.  Cheney, to their apparent surprise, “was in a self-vindicating mood.”  (Knock me over with a feather, but do go on…)  He also helpfully explained that his upcoming memoir, which will  assuredly have Americans queuing up around the block at Barnes and Noble,  would also set the record straight, once and for all, and was merely held up until the “statute of limitations has expired.”  Of course, none of these wide-eyed moppets looked up from their crayons long enough to to query that such a statement could only come from a criminal, one who during the same story hour reminded them, as though it were necessary, that protecting them from the monsters under their beds was “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty, business.”  Lying to credulous reporters is evidently the easy part.

Indeed, it was little more than a Dick Cheney’s golden oldies rehash, with all the usual bits about how “turning the other cheek” is a chump’s game when dealing with “evil,” “hardened,” terrorists, with a new yarn, cribbed from Condi Rice, about how, natch, no one could have predicted the economic collapse.  (with the possible exception of Dick himself, who has been moving assets offshore for years, but that detail never came up.)

Having read the article, twice, backwards and forwards, I was unable to find anything in it that could conceivably be called news, except the fact that the story was written at all.  Although it mentions airily, almost in passing, that Dick is less popular than the clap in a whorehouse, it fails to explain why the fact that Dick is, all these two weeks later, still a fear-mongering, delusional, lying sociopath is considered news.  Everybody already knows about the Legacy Project, and what its tiresome talking points are, but Politico seems to understand that some things are just so startlingly unbelievable that there’s no repeating them too often, so they’re giving Uncle Dick a hand.  Catapulting the propaganda is tough on a guy who’s had a few dozen heart attacks and just got another boo-boo when his tie got caught in the shredder and he hurt his leg on the man-size safe….  But I digress.

One piece of charming atmospheric detail did manage to sneak in some actual “news” that I found heartening, and unintentionally telling.  In mentioning a recent phone conversation with his similarly despised ex-boss, Dick said, “We’re both citizens…  civilians.”  What, in heaven’s name, Mr. Five Deferments, were you before?

Unsurprisingly, Politico didn’t ask that, either.  Steven Colbert would be so proud.  The rest of us, somewhat less so.