Cheney spoke yesterday at CPAC, the conference for people for whom reality is just an illusion foisted upon them by a cold and liberal universe. (The universe, you see, is full of dark matter called Librons, which in addition to keeping the universe from flying apart like Ann Coulter in front of a television camera, have the unfortunate side effect of inverting perceptions of reality for all but the most trained Randian observers. Oh, and Scientologists.) I'm supposed to say, at this point, something like "you can't make this up", but of course you can make this stuff up. It's easy to make it up. That's the whole point.

Some highlights...

As conservatives, we believe in a government that takes up a smaller share of the national income, that treats tax dollars with respect and restraint. And we believe in a government that keeps to its limits under the Constitution, never expanding beyond the consent of the governed.

And then, he farted candy and rainbows. And all the little woodland creatures came out from under the floorboards to help sew him a magnificent new dress for the ball.

The United States is a country that takes human rights seriously. We do not torture -- it's against our laws and against our values. We're proud of our country and what it stands for. [...] America is a fair and a decent country. (Applause.) President Bush has made it clear, both publicly and privately, that our duty to uphold the laws and standards of this nation admit no exceptions in wartime. As he put it, "We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is, live by them.

And at that point, the Constitution Fairy sprinkled her magic Constitution dust over the land, and all the tapes of the CIA torturing prisoners magically erased themselves, and the waterboarded detainees became un-waterboarded, and the vast program of illegal domestic espionage -- so critical to our national security that President George Constitution Bush has threatened to veto all FISA legislation, for all time, unless everyone involved gets retroactive amnesty for their illegal acts -- suddenly became Constitutional.

To prevail in the long run, we have to remove the conditions that inspire such blind, prideful hatred that drove 19 men to get into airplanes and come kill us. And so the President made the decision: We wouldn't just remove the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and let other dictators rise in their place.

Because one of the lesser known Articles of the Constitution is that no mention of 9/11 by an administration official may take place without a possibly hallucinatory-drug-induced conflation of it and Saddam Hussein. And Shrek. Shrek was also there.



I like it. Reality as practiced by a man who can't tell the difference between a grown man standing next to him and a tiny, barely-flight-capable bird. It's not so much a CPAC speech as it is "NAMBLA for the mind." It's a comic book speech, delivered by a comic book man to a comic book audience. Cheney doesn't believe in merely denying reality, he believes in pinning it down, attaching electrodes to it, then just clubbing it to death for fun.

The thing is, it'd be easy to ascribe behavior like this to mental illness, presuming he really believes any of the things he says. But it's not clear he does. In all likelihood, he knows fully well how ridiculous it all sounds, but in an audience hand-picked for their willingness to accept any premise, no matter how ridiculous, in order to feel good about their own bigotries, nobody will ever call him out on it.

It's interesting, because once again one would think it would be a key component of rational public discourse for people to, indeed, call him out on his happy, camouflage-colored delusions. But it's somehow off-limits, in the press, to point out when a public official is an unmitigated, reality-sodomizing liar. Haircuts and pantsuits: fair game. Pointing out that "a smaller share of the national income" means "a larger share", that "restrained" spending means "more" spending, that "keeping to the limits of the Constitution" means breaking those limits, that "no torture" means "torture", and that "9/11" means anything else he wants it to mean at any moment in time: pointing those things out are uncouth activities to be delegated to people like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Keith Olbermann, and a handful of crazy, uncivilized blogs.

And we're reduced to just making fun of it, because really -- what else are you going to do? How do you refute something that's self-refuting?

Go figure.