Dick Cheney and Herbert Hoover, One Thing in Common

From today’s Maureen Dowd column, Daffy Does Doom (TimesSelect required):

Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.

Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

Yes, Herbert Hoover. But the difference is that Herbert Hoover was a moderate Republican who actually cared about the people whom the Depression dispossessed. He just didn’t have a clue what to do about it. Cheney doesn’t even have that (being moderate or caring about the victims of his policies) in his favor. But he does share with Hoover the fact that he has no clue about how to deal with his ‘Great Depression,’ Iraq.

And I also ‘enjoyed’ this quotation from a Cheney interview with Wolf Blitzer about U.S. ‘successes’ in Iraq:

“Bottom line,” Vice told Wolf, “is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes.”

You bet. If you label 3,000+ American-and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths as “enormous successes.”