President Clinton hosting (sans Hillary) private elite gatherings to raise big bucks for her Presidential campaign.
This so deserves a contest. Because there are so many possibilities.
Send us your entry for the most idiotic, 
dishonest or just plain ridiculously wrong quote from our vice president, Dick Cheney. You can go all the way back to January 2001.
There’s definitely a good amount of low hanging fruit. So on those really glaring examples we all know about it, we’ll go with the first reader who sends them in. But there are just so many more. We’ll take the entries and put them together in a top ten list. The top three win a prized TPM mug for the contestant.
As for judging rules, we’ll grade them not only on inherent mumbojumbo and/or the delusional quality of the quote, but also on how well known the quote is. So if it’s one of the two or three Cheney whoppers that easily comes off everyone’s lips, that might not get as high as a score as another that’s a bit more off the beaten path. Anyway, you get the idea. Every quote must have a verifiable source to authenticate it — link to a transcript, an article in a reputable news outlet, etc. To qualify, you must send in the link to verify the quote.
So, you got the rules. Now, let’s do it. Send your entry to the comments email address over there on the upper right. And include the subject heading “Cheney Lyin’ Fool Sweepstakes.” Multiple entries are okay; but only one quote per email.
Tony Snow beefs it at today’s press briefing when reporters try to pin him down on Musharraf’s free ride on al Qaeda and the Taliban.
As you’ve probably seen, there’s been a flurry of articles over the last week about Vice President Cheney, possible plans for war against Iran and murmurs from within the upper echelons of the US armed forces of possible resignations if the White House opts for that new adventure. But beyond all the scary predications and wild tales, Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan have picked out the real nugget: Cheney and the rest of the crew at the White House can’t even seem to get clear on what side they’re on or even what war it is they’re fighting.
That takes strategic incoherence into truly uncharted territory.
Here are the details.
In the Hersh piece in The New Yorker we learn that the US has essentially decided to get out of the al Qaeda/Sunni-jihadist fighting business and redirect our efforts toward fighting the Iranian peril. The real war we’re in the midst of now, it turns out, is the trans-Middle Eastern Sunni-Shi’a civil war. And we’re going to side with the Saudis, who will in turn enlist a bunch of al Qaeda type groups to work on our behalf against Iran.
Now, you may be worried that this sounds rather like how we got into this mess in the first place. But don’t worry. As Hersh writes, the Saudis are assuring the White House, that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.'”
Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say we’re convinced. Back to teaming up with the Sunni jihadists it is …
But wait … Only a short time ago we were told that Cheney and his crew at the White House wanted to take the side of the Shi’as in Iraq’s burgeoning civil war. In other words, for all the attention to who we’re going to attack and how and how many soldiers we need to do it, there appears to be a basic debate (to be generous) or confusion (to be less generous) within the administration over which side we’re even on.
We talk a lot about the ‘surge’ and that’s important since it assumes a intensive military commitment in Iraq for years into the future. We worry about tactics and strategy and whether the White House is going to plunge us into another war as a way to wriggle out of the blame for the current one. But this is a level of folly that transcends all of that: at the most basic level, the folks running the show can’t even decide who’s side we’re on. There’s no real strategy here or grand aim or even stable aim — more like a rather panicked set of improvisations aimed at finding a way to retrospectively justify the mistakes that got us here in the first place.
First Lady Laura Bush explains how TV Distorts our View of Progress in Iraq …
(ed.note: This moment was first flagged at Americablog.)
Longtime reader EF on the Cheney bombing …
Itâs not getting much play this morning, but it has been reported that Cheneyâs arrival in Bagram/Kabul was another of his secret visits. Not secret from the Taliban, however, who managed to send a suicide bomber to the base to greet the VP â and apparently get through the first ring of security as well.
To iterate the unstated obvious, the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda must have good sources inside the Pakistani, Afghan or United States/Nato governments. Or perhaps even the Saudis, if weâre now siding with Al Qaeda against the Shiites, as per your note on the Hersh article. Presumably, Cheneyâs movements are carefully guarded secrets. If the Taliban knows about them, you have to figure theyâre getting tipped to routing military operations as well. That doesnât augur well for success.
I’m just reading the first reports of this. So it’s not clear to me just how close they got to Cheney or what sort of knowledge the Taliban forces in the area would need to mount the attack. Perhaps it was clear there was some VIP visiting — which given Cheney’s appearance in Islamabad, seemed to be him — and they sent someone to the outer gate of the sprawling base.
As long as it’s Cheney day, though, here’s the question I’m curious why no one is asking at the White House press briefing. Vice President Cheney, we’re told, went to Islamabad to warn the Pakistanis that al Qaeda was reforming along the Pakistani border. But we assume this is happening because the Pakistani government signed that armistice with the pro-al Qaeda groups sheltering them. But the White House signed off on that deal. And it was widely predicted at the time that the deal would have just this effect. So why did the White House sign off on the deal that has allowed al Qaeda to regroup bases on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border?
Today’s Must Read: just two weeks after the administration’s rollout of evidence that Iran is supplying weapons to insurgents in Iraq, a raid turns up new evidence that undermines the case.
Brad Delong has “A Question for Jeff Faux”:
Is there a way to interpret Jeff[‘s argument] other than as a call to keep China a society of poor subsistence rice farmers as long as possible–keep them poor, barefoot, uneducated, and by no means allow them to work at any of the high-value manufacturing occupations we want to keep in the United States?
Update: Jeff Faux responds:
Let me ask Brad: Why is it that it is the responsibility of $40,000 year American working families to sacrifice their future in order to raise up the living standards of poor Chinese, when commissars turned capitalists ride around Shanghai in a different Rolls every day?