In the Bush administration's early years, every news broadcast seemed to end with the ominous statement that Vice President Cheney had been "moved to an undisclosed location."
What was the point of those spooky announcements? Was it to remind us that we were supposed to be afraid of terrorists and dependent on our government? Or does Cheney really have a need for exaggerated security measures, either to enhance his sense of his own importance or because he has a degree of paranoia?
Now the Veep has gotten himself thrown out of the Disabled Veterans convention in Las Vegas this month by demanding precautions that might have been appropriate if he'd been invited to speak at a Baathist convention in Baghdad.
Think of the ways this war has been fought on the backs of the soldiers. They and their families have been forced to fight for body armor and proper health care. Some have had their homes foreclosed on while they were patrolling Iraqi streets. Some now find themselves institutionalized along with vets from other wars, missing limbs or sight.
So the Disabled American Veterans invited Uberhawk Cheney to speak at their convention. And he agreed to come—but only if people for whom dressing and donning their prostheses is a long, difficult business would assemble in the meeting room at 6:30 a.m. and wait there for two hours, without going out of a hall sans bathrooms, to hear the Veep who helped send some of them to the inferno that left them maimed for life.
He did the same thing in 2004, and from the vets' point of view, it didn't work.
So this time they said no deal. They uninvited him. Even when President Bush speaks to large crowds, people come and go from the halls, screened by the Secret Service at the entrances.
DVA earlier asked Bush to speak at the convention. He was busy. So the vets will hear from neither their Commander-in-Chief nor his right-hand man. Of course, up on Capitol Hill real patriots don't forget to wear their flag lapel pins, or to remind everyone to Support the Troops.
