CHENEY IS STILL JOHN WAYNE AT NEWSWEEK

The right is losing a war and losing elections, but right-wingers never lose the ability to get the mainstream press to parrot their worldview.

As you know, Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard just wrote a suck-up biography of Dick Cheney. In Newsweek, Evan Thomas just wrote about it -- and, Thomas, despite a few pathetic squeaks of skepticism, presents Cheney almost exactly the way the right wants him portrayed:

Cheney, writes Hayes, woke up on the morning of September 12, 2001, asking: when is the next attack? A lot of Americans woke up that day asking the same question, but while many have been lulled back into semicomplacency, Cheney has never stopped worrying and wondering and -- it must be said -- trying to do something about it.

Dick Cheney -- he suffers so! To keep us safe! It must be said!

Hayes recounts a scene told to him by David Bohrer, the vice president's official photographer, about Cheney at a Secret Service test-driving track in Beltsville, Md. The Secret Service was teaching Cheney how to drive to evade terrorists by executing a "J-turn." Cheney, who had not driven a car in about two years, jammed the Chevy Camaro into reverse, hit the accelerator until he was going about 40 miles an hour, then slammed on the brakes in order to spin the car a full 180 degrees. Bohrer had mounted a camera on the windshield to record Cheney's face. The veep was expressionless throughout. "It was as if he was taking a Sunday drive," Bohrer told Hayes.

Oooh, what a man -- er, I mean, my goodness, isn't that striking!

[Hayes] did ... get Cheney to admit error, almost unheard of by the Bush administration. In hindsight, Cheney tells Hayes, the mechanism for postwar governance in Iraq was a failure. The administration would have been better off letting the Iraqis govern themselves from the outset. "I think the Coalition Provisional Authority was a mistake, wasted valuable time," Cheney said.

Er, considering that the neocons always thought we should simply hand the whole country over to Ahmad Chalabi, Cheney's probably saying he was right all along, not wrong.

Most Americans have not quite grasped how imminent and overwhelming the danger seemed to be, at least to those reading the incoming intelligence. Under pressure to produce something -- anything -- about terrorist planning, the CIA and FBI flooded the White House with raw intelligence, much of it dubious or just wrong....

The bad intelligence was forced on the White House! Nobody sought it out or anything!

In a revealing interview, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (at the time Bush's national-security adviser), told Hayes, "[Cheney] read every intelligence report. I mean every intelligence report no matter how minor. And I was feeling kind of driven crazy by not knowing how to -- at that time we didn't really have a good system for sorting what was reliable and what wasn't. I mean, we were just getting raw reporting of everything that was coming in, you know. So I remember thinking that he had an extraordinary memory ... for all of these things."

Even reading, he has the strength of ten men! And he read day and night just to keep u safe!

But it is clear that Cheney sees through a glass darkly. He goes fly-fishing as much as he can and says as little as possible. If he spoke out, he might say that he worries so that the rest of us may sleep. It is also possible, however, that by striking out at imagined demons, he is creating real ones.

That's the end of the piece, and yes, Thomas rouses himself at the end and acknowledges that Cheney's vice presidency has perhaps been a tad problematic -- but not after portraying Cheney as Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name gene-spliced with John Wayne, with a screenplay by Kurosawa. ("It must be said" in the first excerpt above is another ineffectual note of skepticism on Thomas's part.)

This is why the GOP, even when it's down, is never out: Republicans simply never stop pushing the notion, through multiple media channels, that -- dammit! -- they're right and they've been right all along, even if they're now misunderstood. They keep pushing GOP myths (particularly the bits portraying Republican leaders as men on white horses) even when non-Republicans have stopped believing in them; the faithful, at least, continue to be inspired.

And enablers like Evan Thomas are all too willing to help them keep the church open.

(Via TBogg.)