Delicious speculation from LA Times op-ed columnist Jonathan Chait (login required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works for me): That rumbling is Cheneymania.

If you read between the lines of various right-wing pundits’ public statements, it seems there’s quiet work afoot to get Bush to tell Cheney that he (Cheney) is the obvious person to succeed him as president in 2008. And if you keep reading between the lines, it would seem that the motive force behind much of this talk is — Cheney himself.

There’s actually something very appealing to me in the thought of a Cheney presidency. Friends have taken to pointing out to me how ridiculous I’ve become with the Bush hatred. I’m constantly undermining my own credibility, they say, by insisting that everything I talk about constitutes Still More Irrefutable Proof That I Was Right about what an incompetent boob Bush is.

To which i can only reply, yeah. I do that. But I’m just being honest. That’s how I actually view those things; that’s what’s interesting and significant to me about those events. Which is pathetic, I know. But there we are; the last 4+ years have nurtured a terminal Cassandra complex in me, and now the condition has gone from unwelcome affliction to daily comfort, something that reassures with its constancy, that I look forward to when I open the morning paper. Life has given me political lemons, and God help me, I’ve become addicted to lemonade.

Anyway, when I think about possible successors to Bush, there are few (none?) who offer anything like the prospect for continued exquisite suffering I would enjoy under a President Dick Cheney. Like Jon Stewart, who acknowledged somewhere (in the famous “Tucker Carlson is as much of a dick in person as he is on TV” Crossfire appearance, maybe?) that a Bush victory in 2004 would be better than the alternative for comics whose shtick is government absurdity, I’d probably have more fun on lies.com with Cheney as president than with any other likely Bush successor. Because, as I’ve said before, that man is a shameless mofo (hereinafter, S.M.F.) who really knows how to lie.

This entry was posted by jbc on Friday, March 25th, 2005 at 7:15 am and is filed under george_w_bush. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.