Et Tu, Mr. Vice President?

Most Americans in the past six years have gotten used to the reality of a Vice President who does not serve or address the people of his country, but rather rules in secret, only surfacing when the President has failed to sufficiently frighten the public. Salon's Tim Grieve checks in with the most powerful, but least seen, Vice President in U.S. history-

Truth be told, we haven't seen or heard much from Dick Cheney lately. The last bit of news listed on the vice president's Web site is dated Nov. 22. It's a three-sentence press release announcing that Cheney would be traveling to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 24 and Nov. 25. While we've heard a lot about what happened on Cheney's trip, we haven't heard anything else from Cheney himself. His last public words? So far as we can tell, they came on Nov. 17 -- nearly a full month ago -- when Cheney addressed the Federalist Society in Washington.

One hopes that some congressional subpoenas in 2007 will force Mr. Cheney out more often.

Additionally, yesterday I blogged on how Donald Rumsfeld is trying to distance from the war he was a chief architect of, seemingly pushing the blame toward the President. It seems now that Cheney- his BFF- is trying the same thing. Grieve has more-

...The vice president is lying low, [U.S. News and World Report] quotes a longtime associate as saying, because "Iraq is now Bush's baby, and Cheney doesn't want to be tarred with it in the eyes of historians."

Hello?

As one of the early architects, outspoken proponents and constant defenders of the war in Iraq, Cheney is going to need more than a fourth-quarter disappearing act to avoid having history tie him to the debacle he and the rest of the Bush team created... [I]t was Cheney who sold the war on the claim that Saddam Hussein had "reconstituted nuclear weapons." It was Cheney who claimed that American troops would be "greeted as liberators." It was Cheney who insisted, more than a year ago, that we were seeing the "last throes" of the insurgency in Iraq. And it was Cheney who, as recently as that Nov. 17 speech to the Federalist Society, was saying that if the United States were to withdraw its troops from Iraq, the terrorists would "simply draw up another set of demands and instruct Americans to act as they direct or face further acts of murder." ...

And that's not even including that Cheney was also the key pusher of the the Saddam-9/11 connection (making the false claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi officials in Prague, before later playing down said claim), as well as the claim that Zarqawi had connections to Saddam (which a Senate report officially debunked in September). Cheney was King Neocon inside the White House; I am sorry to say to him, no one's forgetting that.