Harball's David Shuster, who you might remember had a brilliant post last week on a number of Vice President Dick Cheney's crazy comments (on forgotten Ebay revenues, on Iraq-Al Qaeda claims, etc.), has another great post on Hardblogger this morning. Shuster writes in "What's up with Dick Cheney?" thusly:

Last week, I blogged about some of Vice President Cheney's more memorable quotes. Now, the Vice President has given us another incredible quote, even hotter and more controversial than previous offerings. And today, when I called Republicans on capitol hill to read them the quote, several of them suggested, "he (Cheney) couldn't possibly have said that." Well, we've double checked the transcripts... and he did.

Talking about European nations and the war on terror, Cheney said, and I quote: "I think some have hoped that if they kept their heads down and stayed out of the line of fire, they wouldn't get hit. I think what happened in Russia now demonstrates pretty conclusively that everybody is a target. That Russia, of course, didn't support us in Iraq, they didn't get involved in sending troops there, they've gotten hit anyway."

The first two sentences are not the issue... it's the third sentence -- the idea that if Russia had only supported us in Iraq, had only sent troops there, they wouldn't have gotten hit. That is insane [emphasis added]. Russia got hit because of their conflict in Chechnya. It had nothing to do with whether they did or did not send troops to Iraq. Every Republican I've spoken with today has expressed "displeasure" at the vice president's remarks Furthermore, most of them are feeling awfully "queasy" about Mr. Cheney using the murder of hundreds of children in Russia to make an argument about U.S. involvement in Iraq.

It's good to see at least one person in the mainstream media realizes how "insane" the Vice President is.