There's an easy way to resolve all of this, Mr. Vice President: Just quit, so we can skip impeachment and proceed directly to your war-crimes trial

It was kind of a throwaway laugh line in a touchingly compassionate interview on last night's Daily Show when Jon Stewart asked poor Scott McClellan [right] whether Vice President Cheney is "evil." The line got a big laugh, from the audience and from poor Scottie. But when you get right down to it, I don't think Jon was joking, and I don't think the question is a joke. Sometimes the truth can sound funnier, or at least weirder, than a joke.

Here's the start of Peter Baker's report in today's Washington Post, under the headline "Defending Iraq War, Defiant Cheney Cites 'Enormous Successes,'" on Vice's chinwag yesterday with CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

Vice President Cheney said yesterday that the administration has achieved "enormous successes" in Iraq but complained that critics and the media "are so eager to write off this effort or declare it a failure" that they are undermining U.S. troops in a war zone, striking a far more combative tone than President Bush did in his State of the Union address the night before.

In a television interview that turned increasingly contentious as it wore on, Cheney rejected the gloomy portrayal of Iraq that has become commonly accepted even among Bush supporters. "There's problems" in Iraq, he said, but it is not a "terrible situation." And congressional opposition "won't stop us" from sending 21,500 more troops, he said, it will only "validate the terrorists' strategy."

I think the vice president has drawn the issues so clearly now that he's set the stage for the one and only appropriate forum for resolving them: at his war-crimes trial, following either his resignation or his impeachment and conviction.

I just hope that when push comes to shove, our Dick won't weasel out with an insanity cop-out, even though it seems abundantly clear that there isn't a sane cell in his brain. Because he is so uncompromising in his insistence that he is right and the community of sane people are the wackos, and because his insistence has commanded such violent and destructive forces, notwithstanding his indisputable and perhaps humanly unprecedented degree of insanity he should be considered for legal purposes exactly as he claims--totally responsible for his actions. After all, somebody's got to be.


FURTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT POOR SCOTTIE THE SHTUNK

I believe I'm already on record here as suggesting that current White House press secretary Tony Snow, the smarmiest and most annoying man on the planet, was going to make us nostalgic for poor Scottie McClellan. (Somehow I just can't seem to pronounce his name now without the "poor.") In this matter I feel vindicated.

As Jon Stewart pointed out in last night's interview, poor Scottie was installed in his thankless job at a dreadful time, when the Bush White House was beginning to be confronted with its unbroken record of brazen criminality and lying. And as became clear when he famously went to Karl Rove and Irving "Lewis" Libby and asked specifically if they were involved in the leak of Valerie Wilson's CIA status, they had no compunction about blatantly lying to him.

I was startled when poor Scottie mentioned, late in the interview, that he's 38. It turns out that this is technically true but slightly misleading--he'll turn 39 on Valentine's Day. The point is, though, that he was 35 when he was appointed White House press secretary in 2003. His predecessor, Ari Fleischer, was 40 when he took on the job. That may not sound like much of a difference, but those five years can mean a heckuva lot in the trenches in Washington. What's more, Fleischer was also a battle-hardened D.C. combat flack, having put in five years each as chief mouthpiece for Sen. Pete Domenici and for the House Ways and Means Committee.

Poor Scottie, by comparison, hadn't worked for much of anyone in politics except Chimpy the Prez (or Future Prez), and much of that in the considerably Chimpy-friendlier confines of the Texas statehouse. At this remove in time, it seems clear that he was hired to be a punching bag: to be a clueless receptacle for the administration's all-lies-all-the-time press dumpings, and in turn to stand there and take the resulting dumpage--to be, in technical terms, the administration's public shtunk (to Chimpy's nebbish).

It's a heckuva way to treat a poor soul who's never shown you anything except loyalty. But then, as we've had frequent occasion to observe, these are not nice people, the ones who wield power in the name of Chimpy the Prez.