Dick Cheney: Another Grandchild for Worst VP in 200 years

Early reports this morning are that Mary Cheney, the daughter of VP Dick Cheney is pregnant and expecting a baby with her lesbian partner Heather Poe. I'll forbear any cheap shots about the hypocrisy of Mary Cheney spearheading her father's 2004 campaign while the Republicans made attacks on gay rights their primary theme. It's not like Mary Cheney was the only gay Republican implicated in the ugly homophobia of the Republican campaign in 2004. There was Rep. Mark Foley, Kirk Fordham (former chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds), Robert Traynham (communications director to Rick Santorum), and an apparently extensive network of gay staffers on Capitol Hill. According to David Corn, Sen. Mitch McConnell is supposed to have a gay staffer. Actually, the rumor in Kentucky is that McConnell himself is gay and that his marriage to Elaine Chao is a sham. Because there are so many influential gay Republicans, there is not much use in slamming Mary Cheney or Dick Cheney in particular.

Besides, Alan Keyes, Donald Widmon, James Dobson, and the rest of the homophobic bigots on the religious right are going to spend most of the day upbraiding Mary Cheney and her father anyway.

The only point I want to make is that his daughter's pregnancy is by far the best thing that Dick Cheney's been involved with since he became vice-president. Dick Cheney was supposed to be an adult mentor for the woefully ignorant president Bush when he took office. Instead, Cheney the adult turned out to be more of a weird little boy than the President. Cheney has used his position as the most powerful vice-president in American history to pursue the crazed project of trying to vindicate most of the worst qualities of the Nixon presidency. I'm not talking about cutting taxes for the wealthy or handing the Alaska National Wilderness Reserve over to the oil companies. Making life even easier for the "haves" is the ambition of any Republican, straight or gay. Rather, Cheney has been the worst vice-president since Aaron Burr because of his involvement with the Bush administration secrecy campaigns, torturing suspected terrorists, sending suspects off to other countries to be tortured, cooking the intelligence that led to the Iraq invasion, and dishonestly posing one "rosy scenario" after another to justify the whole misbegotten occupation. Cheney has been at the center of almost every Bush administration move to screw up the Iraq invasion, waste American resources, and lower American credibility in the world over the last six years and it literally will take decades for the U. S. to recover from Dick Cheney's vice-presidency.

So, congratulations to Dick Cheney for the upcoming birth of another grandchild. It's the only honorable thing he's been involved with for a long time.