Mary quite contrary

For want of a defense for much of the recently exposed assaults on the American public by the Bush administration, and with prominent Republicans themselves calling the revealed NSA programs "indefensible," Rovian forces appear to be trying to counter the uproar with the only tactic they've fully developed in the last while: use his gay daughter to show that Dick Cheney isn't such a bad guy and attack the Democratic ticket of the 2004 presidential election. Hey, why not? It was pretty effective then.

Ably assisting in this effort comes, as it has so sadly done of late, the New York Times, with a piece of flavourless tripe about Mary Cheney, who wishes to inform us all that her dad is just a "big, warm, fuzzy guy." Now, even if you like Dick Cheney for his "tough" stances on foreign policy, torture and indefinite detention (and that would place you in a group of people only slightly larger than the number of Americans who would eat a rat on reality television*), words like "warm" and "fuzzy" are probably not the first ones that spring to mind when the subject of the veep pops up.

We are then further informed that, just because Mary Cheney is a lesbian, she can support the Republicans because,

[h]owever strongly I feel about the federal marriage amendment, I don't live in a world, we don't live in a world, where you have the luxury of being a single-issue voter.

Apparently, Mary thinks there are other issues that the Republicans have been handling well these days, though she fails to inform readers of just what those issues might be. She also seems to live in a strange cocoon wherein she remains unexposed to the Republican "base," a large and powerful group of people who do live in such a world:

Some of President Bush's most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion.

When the [Council for National Policy] met in the summer of 2004, it resembled a pep rally for Mr. Bush and his allies on Capitol Hill, and one session focused on how to use state initiatives seeking to ban same-sex marriage to help turn out the vote. This year, some participants are complaining that as soon as Mr. Bush was re-elected he stopped expressing his support for a constitutional amendment banning such unions.

Granted, we might concede to Cheney that there is more than a "single issue" here. We can clearly see that there are actually three issues with which the GOP Christian conservative base concerns itself. But, they certainly do like to play up the same-sex marriage issue, something that never fails to rile them beyond all rational measure.

Cheney's statement bring us back to the old dilemma: stupid or lying? Despite her support for a Republican party and an administration that led a vilifiying assault on her "ilk," I don't think Mary Cheney is at all stupid. That doesn't leave much of a choice.

Subsequent to this nonsense, readers are then informed of how vile Cheney believes John Edwards was when he brought her into the election debates, calling him a "complete and total slime." This, despite the fact that the GOP was busily exploiting every other gay person's sexual orientation for their own political ends.

As one might expect these days, the Republican oar-pulling is done by the ever-supplicating Bumiller, who I actually think is on the White House staff. How else to explain Bumiller's long history of producing such drivel? What possible motivation the Times could have for printing her nauseating bilge is simply beyond understanding. Maybe Times' editors hope that Bumiller's smooches will help buffer them against threatened White House investigations of them as traitors.


*Interestingly, Dick Cheney's approval numbers these days are slightly smaller than the percentage of Americans who think that killing civilians in Vietnam was "relatively rare."