Not Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention.  A different Barry.  Dave Barry, from Monday’s “Dateline”:

TOM BROKAW: There are certain similarities between Sarah Palin, who’s the vice presidential candidate, and Dick Cheney, who is now the vice president. They’re both conservative, they’re both from the West and they are both members of the NRA.

DAVE BARRY: However, she is a way better shot, apparently, and she goes after your moose, which is your large studly animal, whereas he goes after what, doves and elderly lawyers.

… so we hope they hand him a rifle again.

Via Instapundit/Knoxville News we learn:

Vice President Dick Cheney is scheduled to be the guest of honor for the 145th-anniversary re-enactment of the Battle of Chickamauga, a campaign in which his great-grandfather fought with the 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

The event will take place on 1,000 acres near the actual battlefield on Sept. 19-21, marking the 1863 battle that was second only to the Battle of Gettysburg in numbers of casualties.
…..
Cheney’s great-grandfather was Capt. Sam Fletcher Cheney, born in Boscawen in Merrimack County, N.H., in 1829. He was an aide-de-camp to Col. William Sirwell, commander of the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Division of the XIV Corps.

Hooper said that as far as he can determine, Dick Cheney’s participation in the ceremony marks the first time a sitting vice president has attended a Civil War re-enactment.

Of course, if tough guy Dick Cheney were around during the Civil War, it wouldn’t have been called Bull Run.  They’d have called it Run Bull!

While these two camps appear strikingly similar …

“John McCain gets that it now costs $80 to fill up your minivan when it used to cost $40,” [McCain] strategy director Sarah Simmons said.

“When you spend $76 to fill up the tank of your minivan, that’s real money,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)…

… these two camps seem remarkably distant:

Dick Cheney (at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yesterday):  “We have to recognize that there isn’t anything out there that is going to get us away from a hydrocarbon economy anytime in the near future,” the vice president announced. “There really isn’t anything on the horizon that today is economic, relative, for example, to basic, good old oil and gas. … The solution for us in the near term — near term being over the next few years — is to increase production.  For far too long, too many politicians have advocated all kinds of other courses of action without facing up to the basic fundamental fact that today we have a hydrocarbon economy, and if you’re going to have cheap, affordable energy available in the amounts it needs to be to run our economy, you’re going to have to produce more of it.”

And John McCain (from yesterday’s “Today Show”):

McCAIN: …the real key to this is nuclear power, alternate energy. We’ve got to–solar, wind, tide, develop batteries. We have to embark on a national mission, a national mission to become energy independent. Nuclear power has to play a big role in that. Not only for energy independence, but also…
LAUER: So enough of the debate about whether we drill in the wilderness areas, because that’s still oil, oil, oil.
McCAIN: Yeah.
LAUER: Your energy plan will take us away from oil?
Sen. McCAIN: Oh, it’ll have to. We have to.

More controversy over Vice President Cheney’s long lost relatives.  From the Washington Post:

Cheney explained that during the course of researching his family lineage for Lynne’s memoir “Blue Skies, No Fences” last year, he learned there were Cheneys on both his father’s and his mother’s side of the family. There was a Richard Cheney on his mother’s side, the vice president said.

“So I had Cheneys on both sides of the family and we don’t even live in West Virginia,” Cheney quipped.

Of course this follows revelations that, to quote MSNBC, “Vice President Dick Cheney is close enough to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to call him ‘cousin.’”

So, again, what would Dick Cheney and Barack Obama’s offspring look like?

Great item about Dick Cheney:

When asked about the scathing tell-all book by Bush’s former press secretary Scott McClellan, Cheney said he hadn’t read it and had no plans to do so. But he did pointedly comment when asked generally about former administration officials who write such books, saying, “I thought Bob Dole got it about right.”

Funny thing is, that’s exactly how Bob Dole refers to himself.

A rare night out for Extreme Mortman last night, attending the junior prom — the annual Radio-Television Correspondents Association Dinner.

Same ballroom (Washington Hilton), same food (last year’s fish), but new punchlines: Bloggers.

Mo Rocca:

“Any bloggers here? Don’t cheer, just rattle your inhalers and the keys to your parents’ house.”

And Dick Cheney:

“In case you don’t know it, Mo’s blog is titled ‘Mo Rocca 180: Only Half as Tedious as the Regular News.’ Among his other credits, Mo used to host a TV show called ‘Things I Hate About You.’ I’m sure I’ve seen that program. Only I believe it’s now called ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann.’ Keith’s not here tonight to savor my company, but we do have many big names from the broadcast media. And you could use a little good cheer, because these are tough times in your industry, in this age of YouTube and the blogs that threaten to overshadow the old media. At times you must feel like you’re at the center of events, but nobody’s really paying attention to you. You understand the world better than anybody, but no one wants to hear it. Now you know exactly what it’s like to be vice president.”

Both blogger jokes were pointed and funny. And both welcome additions to the annual media routine.

UPDATE:  Olbermann Watch puts Cheney’s Olbermann joke on YouTube…

The AP asserts:

Get real, people.

That is not a naked woman reflected in Vice President Dick Cheney’s sunglasses. Although it kind of appears to be.

If you blow up the picture, you can see it is Cheney’s hand gripping the handle of a fishing rod.

The picture was posted on the White House Web site as one in a series of photos of Cheney outdoors. It created a buzz on the Internet on Friday and some cable television shows. On Friday afternoon, the White House photo office released a high-resolution image showing that it is a hand holding a fishing rod.

But our nation’s intelligence has failed us before.  An Extreme Mortman reader with even higher resolution than the government has slips us this:

Naked women?  No, naked ambition.  Talk about seeing the world through rose-colored glasses.

Should President Bush elect not to attend the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics?  That’s the big debate these days.

It’s not just a moral and ethical question.  It’s also a question wrapped up in political history.

Is there precedent for an American president to stay away from an Olympics?  Of course there is  — in fact there are far more examples of presidents staying away than attending.

Here’s the most delicious example.  In 1932 President Hoover declined to attend the Olympics.  He was too busy campaigning for re-election.  And where those Olympics held?  Los Angeles.  Yes, Hoover stayed away from Olympics — in his own country.

He sent Vice President Charles Curtis instead.  We’ll pick up the story from — and we’re not making this up — the Charles Curtis fan site:

For the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, California; at the request of President Hoover, Vice-President Charles Curtis opened the Games for the United States. An actual recording of Charles Curtis announcements can be heard in the movie “The Jim Thorpe Story.”

And here’s photographic proof.  That good looking gent is VP Curtis.

Surely Dick Cheney would be just as intimidating to the Chinese.  So send him to the Beijing Olympics.  He’d strike fear into them.  And probably he could medal in the shooting competitions.

Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) was insistent on pursuing this line of locker-room questioning with Gen. Petraeus yesterday:

PETRAEUS: Senator, the vice president was in Iraq just a couple weeks after that, and he also had a very warm reception.

BIDEN: Did he get kissed? Get a kiss?

PETRAEUS: I believe he did get kissed when he was there.

BIDEN: I just want to know whether he got kissed, that’s all.

When Joe Biden lives vicariously through Dick Cheney, we really ought to be concerned.  Presumably, this is getting to first base, Biden-style.

On Monday we wondered this:

Here’s a test for big media.

Will they cover Bill Clinton nodding off (New York Post video of Clinton snoozing in church here) the way they did Dick Cheney? As you can see, it’s a genre of news that particularly entertains Chris Cuomo …

We got a nice boost in our awareness campaign from Instapundit.

Well glory be. Guess what happened on Tuesday’s “Good Morning America” at the 8 a.m. eastern hour? This:

CHRIS CUOMO (Off-camera) And finally, in the name of balanced journalism, we have some new video. A while back, we showed you Vice President Dick Cheney nodding off at a meeting. Well, this morning, we show you former President Bill Clinton catching some Zs at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event. There he is, behind Martin Luther King III, getting some shut eye. He is sleeping, further blurring the line between Democrats and Republicans.

Perhaps Cuomo reads the blogs. Or maybe it’s an honest victory for equal time news judgment. Whatever the reason, we’ll take it. And in this instance, we’ll give Cuomo public acknowledgment for fairness. And we hope he keeps reading the blogs.

UPDATE:  An Extreme reader supplies us with photo and these suggested captions:

• Thomas Jefferson: “I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever….”
• Robert Frost: “And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep,”
• Martin Luther King: “I have a dream…”