Cheney; Limbaugh

I was thinking about Dick Cheney's appearance on Rush Limbaugh's show on Thursday.

Obviously, it was a pre-emptive strike timed to put the administration's spin on the Pentagon report discrediting once and for all any suggestion of collusion between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. But as I thought about it, the real purpose of the appearance just astonished me.

There is no way that Bush and Cheney are ever going to win back the trust of the Americans who have abandoned them. That ship has sailed. All they have left is the 29-to-33 percent who will never, ever, ever turn who have not turned their backs on them so far, and who they must keep from ever doing so. They need to hold on to that hard core of authoritarian followers who are still willing to believe anything and everything they say. And that, of course, is what Cheney was doing on Limbaugh's show on Thursday. Those people are Limbaugh's audience, so if you want to reach them, that's where you have to go.

So, there Cheney is flogging once again the implication, upon which they sold the invasion of Iraq, that there was an operational relationship between that country and al Qaeda.

Think about -- just to give you one example, Rush, remember Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, al Qaeda affiliate; ran a training camp in Afghanistan for al Qaeda, then migrated -- after we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad, took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq; organized the al Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene, and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra Mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni. This is al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.

Unless he is literally, clinically deranged, there is no way that Cheney does not know that the Saddam/al Qaeda "link" is utter nonsense. But there he is, lying. He knows he's lying, and so does Limbaugh. And yet, these two pillars of morality and virtue, these good shepherds of the Republicanist flock, are sitting there gleefully and enthusiastically exploiting the key emotional weakness which infects the members of their political base. They are affirmatively making fools of their most reliable supporters with the most shameless of falsehoods. They do it without reservation and without compunction.

The cynicism of these people is just breathtaking.