EMANUEL VS CHENEY CONTINUES

Yesterday I made light of the Inside the Beltway tussle between two horrible monsters, Rahm Emanuel and Cheney. I didn't think the dustup would amount to anything. But I may be wrong. Chris Matthews addressed Emanuel on Hardball last night: "I'm betting on Cheney because the guy never loses, ever, a fight. He wins every bureaucratic fight you and I have ever seen him fight. And this time, you're up against him. You got to get a lot of votes to beat this guy."

But Emanuel, who may still actually believe he single handedly beat a Syrian tank on the Golan Heights, isn't backing down. Go, Rahm, go! It would be incredible to see him do something good for the very first time in his hideous political career, marked primarily by doing hatchet-jobs on progressives and grassroots activists and on ramming NAFTA down Democrats' throats. But he says he has Pelosi's backing on this-- and since he calls the shots with Hoyer-- he's got the House leadership on his team. Now we get to see if the ex-ballerina has the balls to follow this through to the end. He says he's got House Rules Committee chair Louise Slaughter, even less of a Cheney fan than Emanuel, to let him offer an amendment tomorrow to the financial services and general government appropriations bill that would withhold funds for Cheney's office until it is "fully declared to be part" of the executive branch.

"He is acting like he's unaccountable to anybody. ... He's taking an unbelievable step, saying he's not a member of the executive branch, he's a member of the legislative branch. ... So I said, If that's your logic, then we shouldn't be funding you through the executive branch. And either Wednesday or Thursday, my amendment will be on the floor because the funding for the executive branch is on the floor. And I'll strike the money for the vice president's office. He can live off the Senate presidency budget that funds him up here. And that's fine."

But can Emanuel win this one-- or is Tweety right? "I feel pretty strong right now, based on everything I've heard from my colleagues, that they think this is unconscionable, his actions, that he is unaccountable." OK, if Emanuel gets this through I'll stop reminding everyone of how he was, legally speaking, an accomplice to Foley's serial child molestations of the House pages. If Emanuel makes this happen, I'll never bring it up again... well, I'll never gratuitously bring it up again and I won't say one bad thing about Emanuel for a full month from the day the amendment becomes law.