Making Flippy-Floppy (Cheney Edition)

Nick Gillespie | September 30, 2004

Widely reviled (and, as I've argued, widely misunderstood) Vice President Dick Cheney has been leading the charge against Man Tan shill and stumblebum presidential candidate John F. Kerry as a dirty, low-down flip-flopper.

So it's fun to find evidence of Cheney's own change of heart (and we're not talking about transplantation possibilities here). Reader Baylen Linnekin points a lonely nation to an August 2000 "Newsmaker" interview of Cheney by PBS newsdroid Jim Lehrer in which the veep is positively Kerryesque on various policy issues. To wit:

JIM LEHRER: So if somebody says, hey, wait a minute, Cheney voted against Head Start, he voted against setting up the Education Department, now he's on the other side, that is the result of what?

DICK CHENEY: Well, I think you have to look at context. I'm - I did vote against the creation of the Department of Education; I did vote against Head Start back in the 80s; I also voted for it at one point when Al Gore voted against it. But the - I think the important thing to keep in mind as well too is that we have learned a lot about what works in education.

Whole thing here. It's worth checking out if only for this picture of Cheney: