So the GOP "strategy" was to have vaguely well-regarded party members attack hated Dems like Pelosi, as Newt is doing. It was not to have their most hated representative attack the very popular president.

Regardless! Barack Obama is going to give a very important and serious National Security talk tomorrow. He will hopefully fight back against the idiotic Guantanamo thing, and he will maybe even come up with a semi-reasonable explanation for his torture photo and tribunal and state secrets policies. But an hour before he goes on, Mr. Dick Cheney will give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

This speech will be about how Barack Obama will get us all killed with his cautious and pragmatic approach to sensitive national security issues. It will be about how torture—which, by the way, was not torture—kept us safe by failing to elicit even a false confession of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, no matter how many times we waterboarded people who had already told us everything they knew. It will be about how Dick Cheney broke the damn law to keep us safe, even though he didn't break any laws, because he didn't torture, when he tortured to keep us safe.

And Democrats are basically delighted with this. The dumber Republicans are putting a friendly face on it, but 57% of the smart ones are less delighted.

So why is Dick doing then? Well, he's a hateful old prick, basically. And he almost certainly believes everything he's saying and he also almost certainly doesn't give a single shit about his party. He is doing this for his own legacy, because soon his robot heart will fail on him, and because he is pretty sure he's right about everything and we'd all see this if it weren't for the anti-evil-old-prick bias of the media (the media that let him be on TV every day saying whatever patently untrue nonsense he likes). And much as we had to violate a couple sacred tenets of the Constitution in order to protect America, the Republican party will have to sacrifice a few election cycles in order to remain properly vigilant in defense of our Way of Life.