Cheney on FoxNews

Sean Hannity's interview of Dick Cheney last night was enough to make any intelligent, informed person's head explode. Andrew Sullivan quite aptly described the interview as a "infomercial." Ironically, while both Cheney and Hannity take pot shots at Howard Dean in the interview, the interview itself does nothing but validate Dean's claim that FoxNews is a propaganda machine for the Republican party. The questions were all pre-cleared softball questions which might as well have been written by the White House communications office (they probably were). We've become so accustomed to this type of coverage by FoxNews, that we tend to forget how truly scary it is. Here's an exchange typical of the interview as a whole:

HANNITY: Let's talk about when a group like Amnesty International compares Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, to what happened in the gulags, where millions of people were murdered. And then later they admit they don't know what's going on. Or when Newsweek puts out reports
that the Koran was flushed down the toilet, and then later they have to retract a story like that. The impact it has on people worldwide and those people that are looking for reasons to hate the United States or justify, perhaps, actions against our troops. How dangerous is that?

CHENEY: Well, it hurts. And there's no question about it. I talked to Hamid Karzai when he was here, president of Afghanistan, shortly after Newsweek had to apologize for their inaccurate report. But the report, in turn, precipitated demonstrations, I think, in Talalabad, in Afghanistan, that led to burning down of a major cultural facility there. Live threatened and so forth. In fact, something like 400 Korans were destroyed in the fire in the cultural center, supposedly as a way of protesting what had allegedly happened at Guantanamo, which of course didn't happen at all. The Koran had not been flushed down the toilet, and the — Newsweek had to
withdraw its comment. It's important that they be careful and exercise a sense of responsibility here, because lives are at stake.

Unbelievable, isn't it? Putting to one side the pathetically loaded nature of Hannity's question, how in the world does Cheney say things like this with a straight face? This is now the second time I've heard him tell this anecdote about Hamid Karzai. Notice how he flat-out asserts that the Newsweek report precipitated the demonstrations in Afghanistan. But, uh oh, Hamid Karzai himself stated on CNN just last week that the Newsweek article was not the cause of the demonstrations in his country (an assessment confirmed publicly by our own military). Why is Cheney always the last person to be informed of anything? Cheney also left out the fact that his funny anecdote-telling buddy Karzai used his recent trip to the U.S. to express his outrage over U.S. treatment of detainees. And given all the reports that have surfaced in the last few weeks regarding Koran desecration (pissing through airvents, etc.), isn't it amazing that Cheney is still echoing Scott McClellan's talking points from a few weeks ago? This is the Vice President of the United States, on a nationally televised fake news interview, baldly dissembling right in our faces.