During a sit-down with ABC News on Monday evening, vice-president Dick Cheney took off one shoe, then the other and hurled both at George Bush's head.
Unlike Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at Bush on Sunday, Cheney scored a direct hit. And thus we learned that not only does Cheney not care about war, torture or the truth, he also holds the president in pretty much the same low regard as the rest of us.
There was something weird and creepy about Cheney's interview with ABC's Jonathan Karl. In a video clip ABC posted on its website in which Cheney defends torture on familiar grounds (that is, torture isn't torture if he says it isn't torture), Karl looks nervous and uncomfortable, as though he expects hooded men to burst in at any moment and drag him off to the waterboarding chamber.
"You almost have to wonder whether vice-president Dick Cheney is some kind of sociopath, or has some psychological desire to get caught," writes Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News.
But it was Cheney's shockingly brazen statements about the decision to go to war against Iraq that should resonate for as long as we are capable of moral outrage.
Karl asked Cheney if he agreed with a statement by former Bush aide Karl Rove that the US would probably not have gone to war if intelligence had revealed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.
"I disagree with that," Cheney replied. "I think – as I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq – what they got wrong was that there weren't any stockpiles. ... What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stocks."
Cheney continued in this vein for a bit before concluding: "This was a bad actor, and the country's better off, the world's better off, with Saddam gone, and I think we made the right decision, in spite of the fact that the original NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] was off in some of its major judgments."
Leaving aside the mind-blowing immorality of Cheney's statement, the vice-president seemed to contradict what his nominal superior, Bush, had said just a few weeks earlier, also in an ABC News interview.
Asked by anchor Charles Gibson whether he had any regrets, Bush replied: "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." And though Bush couldn't say whether he would have refrained from going to war if he had known Iraq did not have WMD ("That's a do-over that I can't do," Bush told Gibson), the president clearly left the impression that the flawed intelligence was the major factor in his decision to invade Iraq. (That was a switch from an interview gave to Fox News in 2005, as ABC noted in its Rove story.)
Granted, Bush's recent statement was widely mocked. After all, it was his administration that relentlessly promoted the most aggressive interpretation of the intelligence, and it's well established that he and people around him had been pushing for war against Iraq from the earliest days of his presidency.
But Bush, at least, had the decency not to say it. Yes, he was being a hypocrite. But hypocrisy, as Michael Kinsley has written, is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. On some level, at least, it was important that the president not rub our faces in it too vigorously.
Cheney, on the other hand, sounds like some renegade Serb colonel, testifying in a monotone before a war-crimes tribunal in the Hague. Which, quite frankly, is the ideal venue in which he can tell his story. He can have a nice, clean, warm cell, and a chance to write his memoirs, the proceeds from which will go to the families of the 4,525 (as of Monday night) dead soldiers from the US, Britain and their allies – not to mention the nearly 100,000 civilian casualties the war has claimed.
Let's be clear. Whether Cheney cares or not, the American and British publics were sold on the war because they feared Saddam Hussein would nuke them, poison them with chemicals or sicken them with smallpox or anthrax.
That's the case that insufficiently sceptical journalists such as Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, helped the White House make. And the revelation of those weapons' non-existence, coupled with the grotesque mismanagement of the occupation, is what fatally tarnished Tony Blair's reputation and transformed Bush into the most reviled president in modern times.
Saddam was a bloodthirsty tyrant, and on some level the world is better off without him. And it's encouraging that the situation in Iraq has improved. But we never had any business going to war, and the cost, combined with the financial meltdown, has brought the US to its knees. It will take years for Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress to dig out from this mess.
For Dick Cheney, the cause of so much suffering, to assert with such smug certitude that it was all for the best is enough to make a jackal puke.