He’s untouchable legally and he knows it.

I’ll bet that’s not true. If Holder wanted to, I’ll bet Cheney could be slapped with an indictment for several war crimes under current existing laws, based on what is already in the public record.

He should not be politically untouchable either, but because of our present complicit and spineless White House and Congress, that seems to be the situation.

Bob in AZ

Poisoning the well of political discourse is exactly right, and it’s the same method as I’ve been calling myth-jacking. Cheney is obviously engaging in myth-making of a sort Robespierre would envy:

SCOTT HORTON, HARPERS.ORG: Every revolution needs its heros [sic]. That was Maximilien Robespierre’s thought when he rose to praise a young soldier named Joseph Barra in a speech in the Assembly in 1793. Barra, engaged in an action against counterrevolutionaries in the Vendée, had been encircled and told to cry “vive le roi!” to save himself, but instead answered with “vive la république!” and was killed. Modern historians sharply discount this as myth making. But Robespierre knew how to go about myth making in a grand way. He commissioned David to paint a memorial to this young martyr to the republic. Büchner’s Revolutionary Spirit

A recent report confirms the enduring power of myths over facts to jack electorates. I’m betting this is Cheney is only too well aware of this basic tenet of propaganda or “influence ops:”

Subjects were presented during one-on-one interviews with a newspaper clip of this Bush quote: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda.”

The Sept. 11 Commission, too, found no such link, the subjects were told.

“Well, I bet they say that the commission didn’t have any proof of it,” one subject responded, “but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that.”

Reasoned another: “Saddam, I can’t judge if he did what he’s being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it.”

Others declined to engage the information at all. Most curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?

The desire to believe this was more powerful, according to the researchers, than any active campaign to plant the idea.

Such a campaign did exist in the run-up to the war, just as it exists today in the health care debate.

“I do think there’s something to be said about people like Sarah Palin, and even more so Chuck Grassley, supporting this idea of death panels in a national forum,” Hoffman said.

He won’t credit them alone for the phenomenon, though.

“That kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the idea … ” he said. “Our argument is that people aren’t just empty vessels. You don’t just sort of open up their brains and dump false information in and they regurgitate it. They’re actually active processing cognitive agents.”

That view is more nuanced than the one held by many health care reform proponents — that citizens are only ill-informed because Rush Limbaugh makes them so. (For the record, the authors say justifying false beliefs extends equally to liberals, who they hypothesize would behave similarly given a different set of issues.)

The alternate explanation raises queasy questions for the rest of society.

“I think we’d all like to believe that when people come across disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their opinions,” said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study.

That some people might not do that even in the face of accurate information, the authors suggest in their article, presents “a serious challenge to democratic theory and practice.”

“The implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there’s no question in my mind about that,” Perrin said. “What it means is that we have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular ways.” Many Still Believe Saddam Was Behind 9/11, And Now We Have Some Idea Why

IOW, we have to explain us organic humans as organisms, complete with desires and such, not reduce us to wind-up Skinnerian voodoo dolls and then rely on kinetic activity to predict and control our behavior. In that latter world, endorsed by APA since 1956, torture is the order of our days.

In the good old days, he could blow off the press because he didn’t need them to exercise power. Now, however, things have changed.

Cheney talks because he *knows* that he’s in danger. The more he feels cornered, the more loudly he talks. This was the BushCo style from day one — push back hard at the first sign of opposition, and scare them into backing down. Cheney’s public speeches are designed to poison the well of political discourse, so that any and all voices that might be raised against him will have to get past the “they’re just playing politics” static.

this is very helpful to me. i’ve been recently using the phrase “poison for political discourse” in reference to dishonesty. but as you rightly describe, it’s much bigger an issue than dishonesty. thanks.