In his interview with (who else?) Fox News, the Veep took complete responsibility for shooting a guy in the face. He disavowed, in particular, any effort to "make it Harry's fault." (Are you listening, Pudgie McClellan?)
For a moment, we at the Egg were thrilled by all this. Wow, we thought. Cheney's really standing up here. He's admitting he made a mistake.
And then our heart sank. This shouldn't be such a big deal. Most of us learned the lesson in grade school, when Dad marched us back to the candy store to apologize for filching that Hershey bar. It shouldn't surprise us when our elected officials take responsibility for their mistakes. The fact that it does come as a surprise -- and a relief -- only shows how conditioned we have been by decades of executive lying. From "I am not a crook" to "I did not have sex with that woman," we have come to take for granted that Presidents will lie to us.
Still, let's be clear: when it comes to evading responsibility, the Bush Administration achieves new levels of shamelessness. Yellow-cake, Plamegate, WMDs, torture and secret prisons, warrantless wiretapping, you name it.
And it's not just about lying and evading responsibility, but about blaming other people for their own screwups. The Administration, and "movement" Republicans generally, continue to blame the CIA for "intelligence failures," even though it is pretty obvious that the warmakers rejected outright any intelligence that wasn't flawed the way they needed it to be. (Don't believe me? Click here.)
By the way, we love Chuck Hagel's comment: "If [Cheney'd] been in the military, he would have learned gun safety."
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