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WASHINGTON - Dick Cheney refuses to be a has-been.

The former vice president's voice appears to carry even more weight than it did in the waning days of the Bush administration.

That's because he never opened his yap this much when he was in office. Most of the time he couldn't be found.

Some people want him to be quiet and disappear. Others are cheering the public relations tour that Cheney began halfway through President Barack Obama's first 100 days, defending the Bush administration's harsh interrogation tactics and other anti-terrorism policies.

Thanks, Associated Press, for dignifying and legitimizing the crap perpetrated by these degenerates with the term "anti-terrorism policies." Who says the news isn't slanted?

Vice presidents typically fade away quietly.

Not Cheney.

When Obama released memos detailing Bush-era interrogation techniques and wouldn't completely rule out prosecuting or disciplining former Bush administration officials, Cheney couldn't stay silent.

Another good one, AP: "interrogation techniques" sounds so much better than "torture" doesn't it?

"It wasn't like on Jan. 21, he planned that he was going to speak out in this way," said Cheney's daughter, Liz, a former State Department official who has traveled extensively with her father. "It was driven by events and I think he will continue to do it if he feels it's important to the public debate."

You mean, if he feels it's important to keep him out of jail, don't you?

"You just have to know the way he works," she said. "He was watching what was going on. He knew it was wrong and he knew he had an obligation to say it was wrong."

The Cheney camp says it's not about politics.

Then again, the Cheney camp are inveterate liars.

In Washington, however, everything is about politics and Cheney's decision to make his case on talk shows and deliver speeches at think tanks cuts both ways. His message fires up conservatives, but also rallies Democratic opponents who don't miss an opportunity to portray the unpopular Cheney as the lead spokesman of the Republican Party.

Interesting; by stating "In Washington, however, everything is about politics" aren't you also calling the Cheney camp liars? Must have been an accident.

"I would think the Republicans ought to be shy in using him as their front," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He dismisses Cheney's appearances as if they were old TV reruns.

Good one! Yeah, nobody watches old TV reruns. That's why there are at least six cable channels devoted to them.

Even some prominent Republicans aren't too happy about Cheney's message.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, the nation's first homeland security chief, was asked if he agreed with Cheney's assertion that the Obama administration has made the country less safe. "I do not," Ridge said.

Commie.

Cheney supporters say the former vice president has received an outpouring of supportive e-mails, calls and comments from the military community, the families of those who died in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and from people at the CIA, which helped carry out the interrogation program.

Because, if only we'd been using "enhanced interrogation techniques" before Sept. 11, we might have had more warning than just a report to President Bush saying specifically that terrorists were determined to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings—and all those lives could have been saved.

His backers claim Cheney is having an impact. They point to Obama's move to reverse himself and fight the court-ordered release of prisoner abuse photos and his decision to revive military tribunals for some suspected terrorists, although he is revamping how that system would work.

Of course, Obama's reasons for not releasing the photos may not be exactly the same as Cheney's. Obama may have realized that the abuses shown are so damning that they would destroy whatever standing the U.S. has in the rest of the world, just as he's trying to build it back up. Cheney, on the other hand, realizes they would incriminate him.

They also cite the Democratic-controlled Senate's vote to deny Obama $80 million to close the prison camp in eight months, as the president promised.

Though it's possible that sniveling weasel Harry Reid had something to do with it.

"It's nothing personal. It's nothing political. It's not legacy," said former Cheney counselor Mary Matalin, who has known Cheney for three decades. "There's one and only one thing that's animating and motivating his advocacy and that's Obama's behavior relative to these security policies - the release of the legal memos and the open-endedness of the potential prosecution of the intelligence gatherers or the lawyers."

Or the former VP?

Matalin said Cheney wouldn't stop talking even if leaders of the GOP asked him to.

And she should know. When will she or her equally annoying husband, James Carville, ever shut up? Why does anybody listen to what either of them have to say? It's obvious to me that the fact these two are married puts every bit of their over-the-top partisan rhetoric into the "meaningless" category. If they each really believed the other side was as vile as they say, how could they stand to be married to one another? (And don't even get me started on envisioning the two of them together...ew!) Either believe it with every fiber of your being, or shut the fuck up!

Cheney, 68, has squeezed public defense of Bush policies into his private life, which he splits between his suburban Washington home in McLean, Va. and his homes in Wyoming and on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

What a selfless guy. Where does he find the time?

He still has Secret Service protection, but drives himself whenever possible. He spends time working on his memoirs and at his transition office in McLean. Every few weeks he hosts lunch for guests around his kitchen table to discuss foreign policy and national security issues. He is with his grandchildren at softball games and Sunday dinners. On Mother's Day, he brought the youngsters all the makings for s'mores and roasted marshmallows.

And then toasted them over his pit of perpetual fire, using his red pitchfork.

Cheney has always been straightforward. But when he walked in Bush's shadow he had to temper his public remarks, stay on the White House message. He could manipulate the levers of powers behind the scenes, which conjured up the image of "Star Wars" villain Darth Vader.

Oh, my—Associated Press going off the deep end. "Cheney has always been straightforward"? Is that really a sentence in a news story? Isn't the Darth Vader image conjured up specifically because he wasn't straightforward, and was manipulating the levers of power behind the scenes while making believe Bush was in charge?

Out of office, he has turned to the podium, television news shows and interviews to insert himself in the public debate - and not only on national security.

In first television interview after leaving office, just 54 days after Obama was sworn in, Cheney said that it's not fair to blame the economic woes on the Bush administration. Cheney said it was a global financial problem that he feared the new administration could use to justify a massive expansion in the government and meddling in the private sector.

Unlike his own administration, which used 9/11 to justify a massive expansion in government, the military, the intelligence sector, police powers, wiretapping, meddling in people's private lives...

"I don't know if this is some sort of psychological liberation," said Joel Goldstein, a law professor at Saint Louis University who has written extensively on the vice presidency. "Now he can come out of the undisclosed locations. He's his own man again. He's free from those restraints that are inherent in being vice president - even if you are the most powerful vice president in history."

Oh, joy. Cheney freed from his restraints. Sort of reminds of of a scene from "King Kong"—though King Kong was a much more sympathetic character.

It's deja vu for Cheney, who once was on the other end of a former vice president unplugged.

In September 2004, Al Gore, the cautious campaigner, transformed into a Bush basher, faulting Cheney for "sleazy and despicable" criticism of the Democrats. A Bush White House spokesman dismissively responded: "Consider the source."

Yeah, consider the source: the guy who actually won the 2000 presidential election, had it stolen from him, then conceded anyway rather than risk putting the country through a constitutional crisis. What a turd.

Anyway, isn't that sentence a bit of a contradiction? How was Gore transformed into a "Bush basher" by faulting Cheney? Were they one and the same?

The tables have turned. At the White House on Friday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said it appears that Cheney's latest speech was an extension of the same argument that occurred "inside these walls" for many years during the administration in which he served for eight years.

Okay, Deb Riechmann (rhymes with Eichmann?), Associated Press writer. I give up. How exactly does Gibbs saying that Cheney was continuing the argument that went on "inside these walls" during the Bush administration—in other words, between him and Bush, while he went about doing whatever the hell he wanted behind the scenes—mean that "the tables have turned" from having former VP Gore say Cheney's criticism of Democrats was sleazy and despicable? In fact, what does the beginning of that paragraph have to do with the rest of it, and how is that a conclusion to the story?