CHENEY SPEAK, YOU LISTEN. The Washington Examiners Bill Sammon provides some fascinating details from an exclusive interview he conducted on Air Force Two with Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney predicts the Republicans will hold both chambers of Congress, says Dennis Hastert is a great Speaker who should not step down, and claims that Republicans dont fear potential congressional investigations should Democrats taken control of one or both houses of Congress. The response by liberals and Democrats to these predictions should be nothing short of utter glee. After all, Cheney is perhaps the most over-rated, tin-eared, bumbler-disguised-as-peerless manager in the history of modern governance, as Josh Marshall explained long ago in his chronicle of the myth of competence surrounding Cheney. Sammon also reports that, As for national security, Cheney rejected the notion that Democrats will win the argument if they decouple the Iraq war from the broader war on terror. They are linked, he said. Democrats may not like that, but Osama bin Laden himself says Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. It just is. Thats classic Cheney: Still clinging to his own talking points, he tries to convince us that the central front for terror his bumbling vision and policies created now justifies, rather than undermines, his muddleheaded leadership and neocon fantasies. Until this morning, I continued to believe the Democrats would fall a bit short in their efforts to take back the House and had no shot in the Senate. In light of Cheneys predictions, I am immediately upgrading the Democrats chances.
--Tom Schaller