"O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables -- meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain"
-Hamlet
Ever since last week's State of the Union, the image of Vice President Cheney's maniacal smile during the president's energy remarks has haunted me. I've spent a lot of time documenting the president's inappropriate smiling (here and here), but there's something really spooky about the vice president at the State of the Union.
Watch the video here. He couldn't stop smiling. It's as if a small, slow-moving, flightless bird was stapled to the president's back -- gasping for breath and waving for help with its tiny malformed wing. Physically retarded prey makes Vice President Cheney smile harder than the First Lady after the rods in her hydraulic grinning apparatus are recalibrated.
However, the most likely reason was, of course, that the vice president knew the president's words were bullshit.
In an effort to soften his already gelatinous image, President Bush outlined a set of goals designed to make him sound as if he's concerned about oil consumption and global warming. The epicenter of the president's earth-shattering strategy is to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next 10 years. What he failed to mention in his Twenty-in-Ten plan, according to the Washington Post, is that it's based on gas consumption projections and not today's numbers. In other words, gasoline consumption would still be significantly greater in 2017 than it is today. And the vice president's crooked, Penguin-y grin begins to form.
Let's say you weigh 300 pounds and your doctor instructs you to lose 20 pounds in 10 months. But he inexplicably bases that weight-loss goal on your non-diet projected weight 10 months from now: say, 400 pounds. You could literally batter-fry and digest both Rush Limbaugh and your choice of McDonaldland characters (Grimace looks the most edible, and, coincidentally, most resembles Mr. Limbaugh) and still meet that 20 pound reduction goal of 380 pounds, but you'd still weigh 80 pounds more than when you started. Thank you, Dr. Bush, for the best diet ever.
The president also outlined a renewable fuels plan, but never mentioned one of the administration's A-list alternative fuels (not "clean-burning" -- just "alternative," the Post noted). This unmentionable fuel happens to be derived from the president's favorite thing ever: coal. The coal-to-liquid process converts coal into gasoline -- gasoline that would produce twice the global warming emissions without any reduction in fuel economy, according to the Public Interest Research Group.
Hilarious! Someone check the video tape for VPOTUS pee puddles on a dais!
Ethanol and grass sound greener, but, according to the New York Times, there isn't enough of either to meet the president's goals. That's where coal-to-liquid gasoline comes in, the Times says.
I'm shocked that Vice President Cheney didn't snarf his beverage during this portion of the address. As it turns out, several of the vice president's favorite things ever are involved in the coal-to-liquid business.
Favorite things like Shell Oil, Bechtel, Nazi Germany, apartheid and Sasol. What's Sasol? It's an oil company that borrowed the coal-to-liquid process from Nazi Germany (which used it for the Luftwaffe) and perfected it in apartheid South Africa. Sasol, as it turns out, is the present-day corporate name of the former apartheid South African state-owned energy department. And we all know about the vice president's support of South African apartheid.
Meanwhile, the Houston-based corporation DKRW Energy just inked a long term contract to build a coal-to-liquid plant in Wyoming, the vice president's home state. Oh, and DKRW Energy was founded by four former Enron executives, including Thomas White who was President Bush's Secretary of the Army from 2001-2003.
"WAH-wah-wah," Mr. Cheney cackles.
To you and me, the administration's remedies have always seemed ridiculous and deceptive -- invading Iraq to fight terrorism; the Clear Skies initiative; No Child Left Behind; and this latest Costanza-ish plan. But in the minds of President Bush and The Penguin, however, their deeds make perfect sense in the context of their unspoken schemes -- schemes which bear little resemblance to rational solutions. Perhaps the president and the vice president can't help but to see the comedy in what they've been able to get away with all these years. And however incompetent they may seem by conventional standards, they're certainly excelling at this level of deception.
Knee-slappers for them, a slap in the face for us.
UPDATE: This article was just posted on the front page here. A choice quote:
"Thirteen percent of U.S. citizens said they had never heard or read anything about global warming, the survey said."
Now that's spookier than Cheney's grin.