Not long before Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run for president, he drove Esquire blogger Charles Pierce up a high wall (think the Green Monster) by saying, “I still have a lot of Republican friends. I don't think my chief enemy is the Republican party…I actually like Dick Cheney, for real. I think he's a decent man."
Pierce opined that Biden’s comments on Cheney were disqualifying (“Anyone who thinks Dick Cheney is a decent man does not have the judgment to cut his own meat, let alone lead the Democratic party”) and asserted, “Decent men do not oversee the outing of covert CIA agents. Decent men do not help deceive their country into a war and then walk away with the profits… Dick Cheney is the closest thing that American democracy has produced to a Goering.”
From Pierce’s Wednesday post (bolding added):
To belabor the obvious, because the obvious is just sitting there begging to be belabored, decent men do not torture, nor do they encourage others to do so, nor do they defend the practice by lying about what it really is. Decent men do not oversee the outing of covert CIA agents. Decent men do not help deceive their country into a war and then walk away with the profits. Decent men do not shoot their friends in the face and go for the Scotch bottle before they go for the cops. Dick Cheney is not a decent man. Dick Cheney is the closest thing that American democracy has produced to a Goering.
…[T]here is now a fairly famous anecdote in which Eric Cantor suggested that the president send Biden up to deal with Congress because Biden knew how to "get 'er done." Not only did the monkeyhouse reject the very notion of a deal, Cantor got bum-rushed out of the House in his next election by the onomatopoeically correct Dave Brat, a know-nothing college professor who is one of the prime public faces of a Republican House caucus now far into full-blown prion disease. What does Biden expect to negotiate with these people? I'm almost afraid to ask.
I know that the elite political press loves the guy almost as much as they love Democratic politicians who can reach "across the aisle" and through the barred windows of Bedlam. But we are not electing someone who merely "gets things done." If we were, Larry The Cable Guy would be leading in Iowa…Anyone who thinks Dick Cheney is a decent man does not have the judgment to cut his own meat, let alone lead the Democratic party.
