Where there's smoke...

There's mirrors.

Rather than address the concerns of millions of Americans who are wondering why secret British documents indicate that the Bush Administration lied to the nation and the world to garner support for an illegal and immoral war, Karl Rove has decided to go on the attack. I won't even taint this blog with his ugly, pathetic words. Suffice to say that his reply to the scathing evidence of the Downing Street Memos is to tell the world that Democrats are wimps.

That's the best he can do. He's like a football coach who assumes that his team will never lose control of the ball and therefore only has offensive plays in his playbook. In football, that would be stupid, because your own success (scoring points) results in turning over the ball to the other team in the form of a kickoff. The rare exception is the case of the onside kick, in which you line up for the kickoff and then try to kick to your own team. If it succeeds, you get another chance to score.

Because the onside kick rarely works, it's only used in moments of desperation, when your team is behind and time is running out. Hmm....

So that's the smoke. Dick Cheney provides the mirrors.

Since no one, even his boss, will wholeheartedly agree with him that the Iraqi insurgency "is in its last throes," he's now parsing the meaning of "throes:"

If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period, the throes of a revolution.

Gee...you think?

On another topic, he indicated that Guantanamo inmates are lucky because "they're living in the tropics."

I'm not kidding. He really said that. Because we know that life in the tropics is always peachy. Just look at Haiti, or the Congo. Woo, what I wouldn't give to live there, rather than in our desolate temperate region with snow and ice and decent sanitation.

He also said that "[t]here isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people."

The problem is, we've seen no evidence that Gitmo prisoners are terrorists. Where are the convictions? Where are the trials? When's the big press conference where you trot out the baddies in handcuffs and tell the world all about the terror you thwarted? You'd think they'd be bragging left and right about all the evidence that justifies these torture camps.

As for the Downing Street Memo, he claims he hasn't read it. Yeah, right. The document that could bring down your administration and force you back to the salt mines of Halliburton boardrooms--you haven't bothered to read it. Liar.

Even though he hasn't read it, he says it's "wrong" and he has a response to it nonetheless, which parrots Bush and Blair's vaudeville routine of last week. Cheney says,

Remember what happened after the supposed memo was written. We went to the United Nations. We got a unanimous vote out of the Security Council for a resolution calling on Saddam Hussein to come clean.

Which is exactly what the Downing Street Memo said you were going to do, as a sham act to help "sell" the war. How does this prove the Memo "wrong"? Liar.

He went on to assure us that the guy who always wanted a war to boost his political capital tried really, really, really hard to make peace.

The president of the United States took advantage of every possibility to try to resolve this without having to use military force. It wasn't possible in this case.

As Jon Stewart of The Daily Show once said, "Mr. Vice President, I must inform you that your pants are on fire."