You might think that Liz Cheney (photo below, left) and Elisabeth Hasselbeck (photo below, right) are a couple of “dumb-blond” comediennes. But that’s not how the media are playing them. The things these two women say boggle the mind. Yet some people on television listen to them respectfully as if their opinions were worth discussing.
Liz Cheney’s credibility is apparently based on the fact that she used to be Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in the U.S. State Department. She was appointed to that position while her father, Dick Cheney, was vice president, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said at the time that the job was created especially for her.
Ms. Cheney’s task was to channel money to favored groups, some of which were not named, reputedly for fear of retaliation from the governments they were trying to undermine. Doesn’t that make you think of shady deals and skulduggery? That’s how I see it, but I might be biased. I think everything connected with Dick Cheney is tainted by skulduggery of one sort or another. But, with the former vice president invading the airwaves to promote his revisionist version of the Bush years, it seems the media have forgotten his underhanded relationship with profiteers from the Iraq War and are treating him as if he were some kind of elder statesman.
Daughter Liz has joined Cheney’s crusade to rewrite history. She was invited on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program yesterday, where she made the amazing pronouncement that her Dad and President Bush never said Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the Nine-Eleven attacks. Last night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow refuted that preposterous claim, playing several video clips in which Cheney and Bush tried to link Saddam and Al Quaida.
Also on MSNBC last night, Keith Olbermann paid Ms. Hasselbeck the compliment of quoting one of her moronic comments. She had said on The View that President Obama failed to mention “democracy” in his Cairo speech. The inference is that the U.S. President is soft on despotism and isn’t the crusader for democracy and freedom that Bush and Cheney were. Olbermann played four excerpts from the Obama speech in which democracy was cited, but you can bet that won’t silence dumb belles like Elisabeth. And other conservative critics will continue to press her point that Bush-Cheney were idealists whose only goals were to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world, while Barack Obama is a Machiavellian manipulator.
The irony of this BS makes me laugh and cry at the same time. Bush and Cheney were a couple of self-serving looters without scruples or shame. No one with the slightest intelligence could possibly be taken in by their self-righteous posturing. Why anyone cares what the Cheneys have to say beats me. And as for that Hasselbeck chick, someone should start a fund to get her a brain transplant.
