There’s a difference between political courage and political gamesmanship

But, Uncle Fester doesn’t care.

For Dick Cheney to compare the decision to invade Iraq with Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon shows that he and Bush don’t even care what sort of lies they tell — they’re just going to continue to throw shit against the wall until they get something to stick.

Of course, Cheney made no such comparison while Ford was alive, either. That’s because he knew both what Jerry Ford thought of the decision to invade Iraq and what he would have thought of such a slanderous comparison.

And, Cheney’s lying in that he’s not even discussing how the Iraq war vote was ultimately an act of political gamesmanship. Of course, we have former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt to thank for that, too, if we want to bring political cravenness into the picture.

Gephardt undercut other members of his own party while keeping an eye on the 2004 presidential contest. Daschle was just fucking spineless, as he was so often, and with more power in his hands than Gephardt, in some ways. How you could not filibuster or threaten it, or use other Senate procedural tools to force the war vote off until after the midterms?

No political courage there, either.

(Note: I’m not praising Ford’s pardon of Nixon, but I do agree that it was an act of political courage.)