Blame It On Senility

Radioblogger, aka "Generalissimo Duane," Hugh Hewitt's radio show producer, is one of the unsung heroes of the blogosphere. While many of us wouldn't have sufficient blood pressure medication to subject ourselves to the crazy doggerell of Harlem's own Charlie Rangel (aka a Democrat congressman from New York), there was RB on Friday night, ear pressed against the speakers blasting out "NY1" hosted by Davidson Golden. It was on this program that Rangel meandered into a demand that Vice President Dick Cheney quit:

CR: He (Cheney) should have never stepped up in the first place. He's too old for the job, and he doesn't have any experience.

The first lamentation is about five years too late. And, in point of fact, it was not Cheney who sought the veepacy, but George W. Bush who recruited him into it. Surely Rangel isn't getting reluctant to criticize President Bush; if that's the case, the very fabric of the space-time continuum could be in peril.

The second crack is curious, given that Rangel himself is over a decade older than Cheney, and the roster of Donk geezers in the Senate include Harry Reid, Teddy Kennedy, and Bob Byrd, all of whom are older than Cheney and think they should be one slot above where Big Time sits; heck, Rangel's own Minority Leader, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, is Cheney's senior as well.

The third slam is kind of difficult to evaluate, since to this day I'm not sure that the vice presidency even has a detailed job description beyond "presiding over the Senate." But to say that Dick Cheney "has no experience" is just silly. He's been White House Chief of Staff, served in the House of Representatives, from where he was plucked to become George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense. And as RB helpfully points out, he did run this little mom & pop operation known as Halliburton. Indeed, the Veep is considered one of the most qualified people in the country to be president, which is why there is still a "draft Cheney" movement for 2008 even though he has made it beyond unequivocal that he isn't running.

Happily (or not, depending upon your tolerance for left-wing BS), Rangel wasn't finished:

DG: Now that he's there, do you think he's capable of remaining on the job?

CR: If you want to take the deficit and charge that to him, the war and charge that to him, the fact that we lose it every day, the fact that they don't intend to pay for the damages in the Gulf states except through budget cuts, I would like to believe that he's sick, rather than just mean and evil.

From this graf, one would think that something had happened to Dubya and Cheney had already succeeded him. Strictly speaking, the deficit is "chargable" to Congress first, and the President second since he has yet to veto any of the overspending that Rangel later defends in the very same run-on sentence. Since the Vice President doesn't make these decisions, I don't know how you could "charge the deficit" to him.

The war is a little different, though not much. Its conduct is the President's prerogative, and Cheney is certainly on the same page with Bush. But Congress did authorize Operation Iraqi Freedom as well as Operation Enduring Freedom, so the "chargability" is again inconveniently diluted.

I really don't know what he means by "we lose it every day," but I suppose there might be a clue in how Rangel wants to transform the military from an elite, professional all-volunteer force back into an unwieldy conscript-dominated entity. Surely if Rangel really believed that "we're losing [the war] every day," and is, you know, patriotic, he wouldn't be in favor of forcing young Americans to give up their lives in a conflict that is a lost cause, would he?

OTOH, if he wants us to lose, dishonoring the sacrifice of nearly two thousand brave warriors who did believe in the cause for which we are fighting, he could hardly pursue a better avenue than bringing back the draft, which would make it considerably easier for the anti-American Left to turn public opinion against the war, and which, as was the case in Vietnam, is the only way that we can lose it.

Then again, House Republicans, as I recall, brought Rangel's draft reinstatement bill to a vote a year ago, and it went down to near unanimous defeat - 402-2 - and Rangel himself voted "nay."

Take old man Charlie out of Congress and he'd be one of those elderly pensioners you see when you walk through the park, sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons and mumbling to himself. Leave him in Congress in just about any time prior to our own and he'd be...well, one of those elderly congressmen you see on C-SPAN late at night mumbling to an empty House chamber. But in this time he resides smack in the mainstream of his party, which is full to bursting of people of both genders and all ages, but who just about all sound like elderly pensioners sitting on park benches mumbling to themselves.

And what they, and Charlie Rangel, are mumbling is things like, "If only I were in charge instead of Dick Cheney...."

And that's why they never will be.

At least not until they become a lot more like...Dick Cheney.

[HT: CQ]