Charles Pierce points out to Joe Klein he’s right over the shark:

Sweet mother Mary, Dick Cheney performing for Brit Hume and GUYS IN VIETNAM? An aging corporate carnivore downing beers and stalking farm-raised game, and some poor young guy drafted out of Butcher Holler and dropped into a jungle kill zone? Dick Cheney, as a boomer, learning the lessons of An Loc on the killing fields of some plutocrat’s toy wilderness? And being sadder and wiser for the experience? And Bob Kerrey, who’s said enough flaky stuff in his day to take a job with Kellogg’s, chiming in with some look-there’s-a-unicorn psychedelia about how this may make Cheney “have a better sense” of what he’s asked other people’s children to endure? What kind of mushrooms do they serve in the dining hall at The New School anyway?

This isn’t a serious conversation.

This is a Lifetime TV movie.With khaki and camo.

Look, Joe. I’m sorry you didn’t go to ‘Nam, OK? I’m sorry you’re going to have to enter your declining years without the kung-fu grip. Can you try not to drag the rest of us into your midlife crisis, please? I mean, you there, Tomasky. You live there. Does anybody edit these clowns? I mean, seriously, does anybody read this over at the copy desk and think,”Jeebus Christmas, Klein must be on freaking acid to make this comparison. Should we alert the authorities? In any case, these are pretty plainly the rantings of a man gone, as the late George V. Higgins would have put it, as soft as church music. We can’t publish this. It will make him look bad. Let’s pretend we lost it in the system and maybe he’ll forget and send us something about health care or Iraq. Why didn’t I take that job at Home And Garden when I had the chance?”

I have worked full-time for three magazines in my life. I have freelanced for a half-dozen more. I am telling you now that, if I had ever handed in a piece of fanciful mock clairvoyance like this — if I had said, for example, that, by striking out in a crucial situation, Nomar Garciaparra must now be humbled and know how Lee felt when he sent Pickett across the pastures — there isn’t a single editor for whom I ever wrote that wouldn’t have poured himself a martini as big as a horse’s leg and laughed himself out onto 57th Street. If I always wrote like that, I’d be driving a crosstown bus by now.

There are a number of things wrong with this comparison and the fact that it’s plainly nuts is only the most obvious. First of all, no soldier in Vietnam had a covey of flacks to disperse and blame the people he shot for their own deaths. (Well, Bob Kerrey did, but that was years later.) No grunt at An Loc got to shoot someone and then walk over to the opulent ranch house and mix himself a coldie before talking about it. The only time Dick Cheney ever got a “thousand-yard stare” was when there was an oil field 1,000 yards away from where he was standing. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but: NEITHER HARRY WHITTINGTON NOR THE QUAIL WERE SHOOTING BACK! Forget my editors. This wouldn’t have gotten past Sister Marie de Paul at St. Peter’s School in Worcester, Mass., back in 1965.

Gentlemen, Dick Cheney does not do introspection, OK? In Texas, the birds he was killing were bigger than his conscience is, and they were exercised more often. That he busted a cap in his friend’s dome did not change this in the least. His first instinct was to go for the liquor cabinet and his second was to go for the spin. This constant search for good faith and human decency on the part of people who have spent their entire public careers avoiding either one is totally a function of having walked among the Great Men for too long. Bob Kerrey, who wanders through life disheartened that the presidency is not an appointed position, must know that at some vestigial level of his being. Joe Klein and the rest of the cats ‘n kittens in the political press corps, are more charming in their delightful naïveté. George Bush is a cowboy! Condi Rice is a genius! Dick Cheney has a soul to search!

Why aren’t any of these people ever at my poker table?