John King's Abdication:
Somewhere in Hell yesterday, Augusto Pinochet watched John King's interview with Dick Cheney on CNN. Whenever the former Vice-President appears, Lucifer makes sure that all the underworld's screens are tuned in. He wouldn't wanna piss off Cheney. "Are you fuckin' kiddin' me?" Pinochet wondered out loud between his screams as the bones of all the people he disappeared were shoved down his dickhole into his urethra. The Chilean dictator turned to femur-wielding demons with Salvador Allende's face and said, "Seriously, to get that kind of hummer from a reporter, I'd've had to have threatened to skin his girlfriend alive." Pinochet instantly regretted what he'd said. One should never give demons an idea.

Cheney may as well have been talking to a John King puppet. More precisely, he may as well have been jacking off with a John King puppet on his hand. Because, apparently, challenges and follow-up questions are to John King what boric acid is to ants. He dare not even step near it.

Here's one exchange where King is allegedly confronting Cheney:
"KING: When you came to office, the unemployment rate in the country was 4.2 percent, when you left it was 7.6 percent. The number of Americans in poverty when you arrived, just under 33 million, over 37 million when you left. The number without health insurance, a little over 41 million when you came, over 45 million approaching 46 million when you left. And you came with a budget surplus of $128 billion and in the final year, the budget deficit was a record $1.3 trillion. So what would you say to someone out there watching this who is saying, why should they listen to you?

"CHENEY: Well, there are all kinds of arguments to be made on that point. But there's something that is more important than the specific numbers you're talking about, and that had to be priority for our administration. Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11. We had 3,000 Americans killed one morning by al Qaeda terrorists here in the United States. We immediately had to go into the wartime mode. We ended up with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of that is still very active. We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina, for example. All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren't originally part of the budget. Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did."

So Dick Cheney just said the economy is in the shitter because of 9/11, seven and a half years ago. And King's follow-up was not "Holy fuck, you are a fucking psycho cock-headed motherfucker, aren't you?" or some variation on that. Nope, it was: "But you're a conservative administration, spending more than $1 trillion." And then Cheney repeated some bullshit about this war, actually comparing it with World War II, which King never challenged with, "Ummm, you chose the war, fuckbag."

John King's approach to Cheney was like a cat in heat's approach to an alley tom. He put up his haunches and let the ex-VP go to town. When Cheney said that Barack Obama was making America less safe by halting waterboarding and closing Gitmo, King said, "I want to give you a chance -- and take as much time as you want -- to prove it." As if Cheney didn't have years to prove it. And then he didn't go after Cheney for not proving it.

It wasn't journalism. If the purpose of journalism is to seek some kind of truth, then King walked away from his role in that mission. He was merely a sounding board, a kennel wall for a savage dog to hear the echo of its own snarls.