I haven’t been kind to Ross Douthat in the past, referring to him with perhaps an excess of sarcasm as Ross Dumbfuck. Well, I won’t descend to that level today, but I will say that his debut column in the New York Times, “Cheney for President,” is not a winner.
“Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies,” Mr. Douthat opines, “it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.”
The point of Ross’ contrary to fact Gedanken experiment is that if Cheney lost, his brand of 1984 conservatism would be discredited completely, and the Republican Party could “move on,” as the saying goes. But since John McCain was a squishy, kinda like torture, kinda don’t kind of guy, his defeat didn’t really supply the closure the Party needs.
Well, in a way, it would be nice if Big Dick had run for President and had gotten his Big Ass mightily kicked, if he had suffered an electoral humiliation so intense that all of his “torture is good, habeas corpus is for sissies” bullshit had been washed down the drain.
But that hasn’t happened. Dick is still on the loose, still trumpeting his “liberalism is treason” fascistic shit like a mastodon in must. And he isn’t going to stop just because people like Ross sort of wish he would. Not that they would actually criticize him, of course. That would be wrong. It would also take, you know, balls.
