Listen to Me!

Noted medicinal marijuana convert Sanjay Gupta gets at the heart of wingnuttery in an interview with Dick Cheney, whose Manichean Paranoia keeps him from seeing the degrees of difference between doing your job, and doing it well.

Sanjay Gupta: Did you worry about your physical health impacting your judgment and your cognition?
Dick Cheney: No.
Sanjay Gupta: Not at all?
Dick Cheney: No.
Sanjay Gupta: Were you the best you could be?
Dick Cheney: You know, I was as good as I could be, you know, given the fact I was 60-some years old at that point and a heart patient.

So, yeah, I had limitations, but I'm still 10 times the neocon warmonger all the other possible VP nominees were.

Sanjay Gupta: This idea that you have this respected heart surgeon from Texas [Denton Cooley] who didn't see you, didn't examine you, and then writes something saying that you have normal cardiac function. That just wasn't true, Mr. Vice President.
Dick Cheney: Go ask Denton Cooley about that.

So, "Go fuck yourself. You can call me a liar, Denton Cooley might call me a liar. But you won't get me to call myself one."

Sanjay Gupta: But sir, you saw it.
Dick Cheney: Listen to me, I think the bottom line is: was I up to the task of being vice president? And there’s no question. I think based upon the fact that I did it for eight years that they were right.

"Listen to me..."

As Professor Harry Frankfurt tells us in On Bullshit, a bullshitter changes the rules governing their end of the conversation so claims about truth or falsity are irrelevant. It doesn't matter that Dick lied about the severity of his heart condition before becoming Vice President of the United States, what matters is his circular logic that he did the job, so he must've been fine.

The most important part here, for the purposes of Keep Talking, Wingnuts, is the "Listen to me." This is Dick threatening you. He is saying, listen to me, or I'll shock and awe you into the stone age. This is the right wing infatuation with violence personified and deferred to.

This is a now powerless Dick Cheney saying, because he can't send Navy Seals or a drone to kill you, "I'll be damned if I'm going to sit here while you try to say that the disaster that was the Bush administration is my fault because I ignored the connection between heart disease and memory loss, depression, impaired cognition, and impaired decision making abilities."

That list of the side effects of Cheney's heart condition perfectly describe the 8 disastrous years he uses as evidence that he was fit to do the job. Couldn't have said it better myself. Keep talking, Dick.

If Jeb Bush Keeps Talking about His Brother, We'll Keep Listening

Jeb Bush must've heard us asking wingnuts to keep talking, because he just won't shut up. He pulled a Full Ginsburg Sunday promoting his book on immigration, changing positions so often that he looked like Alex in the fast motion sex scene from A Clockwork Orange. In the midst of all his steamy bullshit, he managed to squirt out another little gem of wingnut speak that deserves a pin spot from this booth:

"So my guess is that history will be kind to my brother, the further out you get from this and the more people compare his tenure to what's going on now."

Actually, he makes a good point, if he's talking about the 8th grade history books being used in Louisiana voucher schools, which  Steven Hsieh discovered have this little tie-died bit:

Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.

Hippie punching never gets old with wingnuts. So, yeah, that history might be kind to W, but in the real world, we work with facts like this: despite inheriting the Little Bush Depression, with 750,000 jobs being lost PER MONTH when Obama took over, and despite massive layoffs in public sector workers never seen in any other recession, Obama has seen more jobs created during his first 4 years than Bush did in 8.

In the real world, we work with facts like this: "That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms." And this: "Under Bush, the number of people in poverty increased by over 8.2 million, or 26.1 per cent. Over two-thirds of that increase occurred before the economic collapse of 2008."

The most agonizing thing about the slow motion disaster that was the Bush years, however, has to be the Iraq war and his massive tax cuts to the rich. The facts non-wingnut historians will be noting about these boondoggles for centuries are horrifying:

By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. 

Any serious history of the Bush administration would have to include this: somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million people died as a result of the Bush adventure in Mesopotamia.

Any historian that treats Jeb's brother kindly should go hunting with a drunk Dick Cheney when he's loaded for bear.

Neo-con Dome: Cheney rips Condoleezza Rice

Dick "The Liberator" Cheney is one wingnut who should definitely keep talking:

"I thought [destroying the reactor] would reassert the kind of authority and influence we had back in '03 when we took down Saddam Hussein and eliminated Iraq as a potential source of WMD," Cheney says in the film, The World According to Dick Cheney. "Condi was on the wrong side of all those issues so we had significant issues."