TNR's Michelle Cottle isn't impressed by Vice President Dick Cheney's recent decision to seek a family hardship deferment from The War on Sodomy:

No one doubts that the Vice President's apostasy on this issue is entirely personal. If Mary [Cheney] weren't a lesbian, Cheney would at this very minute be somewhere deep in the red states, warning voters in that scowling, brook-no-arguments way of his that gay marriage is exactly the sort of fuzzy-headed liberal nonsense that gives aid and comfort to Al Qaeda. (Lynne would be right there beside him, blaming the whole mess on those perverted, Mapplethorpe-loving bastards over at the National Endowment for the Arts.) But because one of his kids happens to bat for the other team, suddenly Dick's a free-to-be-you-and-me, "freedom for everyone" kind of guy....

I understand that all politics are personal. But are we really supposed to applaud a man who strays from his pinched ideological worldview only when it serves to benefit himself or someone in his circle of intimates? That's not compassionate conservativism; that's political cronyism (or, in Mary's case, nepotism).

Of course, if having personal ties to an issue is what it takes to get the Vice President in touch with his softer side, we should probably all be rooting for Cheney to discover that, in addition to having a gay daughter, he also has a couple of black grandkids, an illegal immigrant cousin, an aunt with a drug habit, a transsexual brother, a sister who just got laid off from a textile mill in North Carolina, and a long-lost son who's been getting his butt shot at in Najaf.

With enough rabble-rousers, poor folk, and minorities in the family, the Vice President might actually be forced to become a tolerant, compassionate kind of guy. Barring that, we can only hope that enough swing-voters see through Dick's freedom-for-everyone b.s. to send the dark-hearted, autocratic jerk back to Wyoming come November.

That's right. And the rest is here.

--------