I Will Keep Asking

I feel like John Wheelwright, the narrator of John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany" who knows full well that when he reads a newspaper he will find some story on the Reagan Administration. When he reads it it fills him with anger that can take days to subside. He tries to avoid the newsstands and machines, but can't. I'm the same way with Morning Joe.

I thought it wasn't going to be too bad. Joe was "on assignment." So the gang was chatting with the alternate White House reporter, who's a lot cuter than Chuck Todd. So my blood pressure remained normal, well normal for me.

Then on comes Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former Veep. And she blathers on and on, being an apologist for the old man, and he needs as many as he can get. She blames the administration for not talking with her dad. Apparently they're talking to everyone about torture, but not to him. When asked if her dad's approached the White House to give them his information, she says he has not, but the White House should be approaching him. The mountain to Mohammad.

She goes on and starts talking about the many accomplishments of the Bush Administration. No, seriously. And then it comes out. She says one of the good things her dad and the other guy did was to not let Iraq return to being a safe haven for terrorists.

It's a line we've all heard many times. We've heard it many times because that's the plan. It's a trick that Cheney learned from Joe Goebbels and the Nazis, one of many. If you tell a lie often enough, people begin to believe it. And the folks sitting around the Morning Joe set have obviously have heard it often, because they didn't get upset that lies were being told on their show. But it's a lie. Dick Cheney knows it. Liz Cheney knows it. Mika Brzezinski knows it. Mike Barnicle know it. Even the fatuous Willie Geist knows it. But not a damned one of them confronts Cheney.

Then Joe Scarborough calls in. An editor from Time Magazine referred to him last week as a new leader of the Republican party. Or was it a leader of the new Republican party? Anyway, I figure as some kind of leader of something, and in an effort to give the show that's named for him some smidgen of character, I was thinking he was going to correct Ms. Cheney.

No.

I don't hear everything that Joe has to say because I'm retrieving things I had thrown about the room during Ms. Cheney's diatribe. But I do hear him when he goes back to his latest topic du jour. He talks about the information in some classified CIA documents that prove that the enhanced interrogation tactics have been successful.

Joe, if you know the exact details of those memos you need to present yourself to the U.S. Attorney, plead guilty to accessing classified information and hope by naming your sources you can get a softer prison term. If you don't know the exact details of the memos, shut up. Just shut up! Just because Dick Cheney says the information is there, doesn't mean it's there. He's lied before, he will lie again.

I know why Joe is considered a leader in his party. He's either a criminal, or a liar. Or quite possibly both.

When are people going to learn that in order to prove your point and further your cause, you need to use the truth?