Cheney: A certain absence of manliness, as they used to say

There's something about Cheney's (Cheney's in particular, but not exclusively) wussiness that hits me right in the schnozz. 

On April 5, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asserted in a court filing that Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003 op-ed piece in The New York Times criticizing the Bush administration's Iraq policies "was viewed in the office of Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq."

So here we have a high-ranking public official who allegedly believes that a former ambassador has blurted something publicly that is wrong, could do harm to the republic and to the office of the vice president.  Murray Waas updates us on the Fitzgerald filings.

Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report.

The March 2002 intelligence report was a debriefing of Wilson by the CIA's Directorate of Operations after Wilson returned from a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims, later proved to be unfounded, that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation, according to government records. The debriefing report made no mention of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, then a covert CIA officer, or any role she may have played in her husband's selection by the CIA to go to Niger, according to two people who have read the report. The previously unreported grand jury testimony is significant because only hours after Cheney reportedly instructed Libby to disclose information from the CIA report, Libby divulged to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper that Plame was a CIA officer, and that she been involved in selecting her husband for the Niger mission.

What does Cheney do?  Does he go on the air to explain?  Does he go to the New York Times and carefully refute Wilson's offending statements?  Does he call the miscreant into his office and chew him out, pressuring him to recant and apologize?  No.  He hides behind his principal aide and lobs iceballs at the evil-doer's wife, for god's sake! 

So much of what Cheney does shows the fear-driven madness of the bully challenged.  Bullies can cause a lot of damage but we also know are not considered to be genuinely strong.  The stronger you are, the more apt you are to deal directly with a problem that affects you personally, not hide and whimper.

From delegating of butchery to others in Florida 200 to the "I can't cope" look on Bush's face in the Florida elementary school classroom on 9/11 to Cheney's constant posturing and hiding as in the matter of the hunting accident, one can't help but come away with a picture of incompetence and defeat. 

While we on the subject of wussiness and bullies, how about them tin-pot dictators, Bush and Ahmadinejad having a pissing contest in full view of the world!  I don't know which of them is worse, though I think Bush may have the edge in pomposity while Ahmadinejad looks personally a bit tougher.  It would be funny if people weren't going to die from the "collateral" spray of their piss.