Welcome to the Mud Room, a joint commentary series of Rumble Strip Vermont and the Dooryard.

Today, a response to Dick Cheney's editorial about Iraq published in the Wall Street Journal on June 17th.

This commentary is from Robbie Porter and it's called A Man of Wealth and Taste.

Welcome. If the devil walks this earth in human form, and he's not Rupert Murdoch,

then he's sure as hell got to be Dick Cheney.

And now, with the Wall Street Journal publishing Cheney's editorial on Iraq, they've combined forces.

Murdoch's most successful hate monger, Fox News, stirs up low-level sectarian hatred here in the United States by setting

conservatives against liberals and Republicans against Democrats.

Sectarianism is a malignancy in human behavior, one we Americans have

largely avoided because our founders separated religion

from government and created a country based on individual rights and freedoms rather than

tribal loyalties.

Iraq is not so lucky. Sectarian violence, the inevitable result of Cheney's

war, has been unleashed on the country, and you'd think Cheney might have a flicker of contrition.

Instead, his recent editorial in Murdoch's newspaper

blames Obama for the misery in Iraq. This is such bottomless hypocrisy that it is hard to

imagine a mere mortal, even in a deluded moment,

rising to the challenge of thinking it, not to mention writing it.

When I was in college, there was a man who had worked his way up from the hard streets of Mexico City

to become a medical doctor and then a philosophy

professor. He said, you soft American kids, you don't know what evil is, but there is evil.

I thought of evil as a superstition, an outdated medieval notion as ignorant and useful as bloodletting.

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