Motivations

Apparently Dick Cheney is out hawking a book, which hopefully will include his younger years in the proto-punk scene at CBGB (look very closely at the bassist for Blondie and you'll see). This may lead some to believe that the media spectacle of Cheney popping up from the undisclosed location every five minutes into TV studios far and wide was a kind of pre-emptive book tour designed to raise his advance price. But actually, it seems that daughter Liz, who has been just as ubiquitous, let slip what perhaps could be the real reason for the press junket:

L. CHENEY: I don’t think he planned to be doing this, you know, when they left office in January. But I think, as it became clear that President Obama was not only going to be stopping some of these policies, that he was going to be doing things like releasing the — the techniques themselves, so that the terrorists could now train to them, that he was suggesting that perhaps we would even be prosecuting former members of the Bush administration.

Now, contrary to daughter Liz, the President has never suggested prosecution, in fact going out of his way to suggest the opposite on numerous occasions. So ol' Dick probably doesn't have much to worry about on that score. But he certainly did notice the growing outcry around these issues as the months went on, and knew somebody had to throw the media off the trail before all H-E-double hockey sticks broke loose and people started seeking the dreaded accountability. Fear has always been a powerful motivator for Cheney, and if there was a 1% chance of him going to jail for war crimes, he had to treat it like an inevitability, and waterboard the truth until it gave up.

After all, Cheney is nothing if not adept at getting out of going places.