Not long before Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run for president, he drove Esquire's Pierce up a high wall (think the Green Monster) by saying, “I still have a lot of Republican friends. I don't think my chief enemy is the Republican party…I actually like Dick Cheney, for real. I think he's a decent man."

Pierce opined that Biden’s comments on Cheney were disqualifying (“Anyone who thinks Dick Cheney is a decent man does not have the judgment to cut his own meat, let alone lead the Democratic party”) and asserted, “Decent men do not oversee the outing of covert CIA agents. Decent men do not help deceive their country into a war and then walk away with the profits… Dick Cheney is the closest thing that American democracy has produced to a Goering.”

Here's a pro-tip for Chris Matthews. If you're going to blow a dog whistle on your national program about how a neo-conservative Jewish guy is a political puppet master, you might want to not add insult to injury by doing so as Jews the world 'round celebrate the new year.

During an appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 on Tuesday night, CNN’s Paul Begala blasted Vice President Dick Cheney for blaming President Obama for the rise of ISIS. The Democratic strategist argued that Cheney’s comments were “a portrait of a political sociopath...I actually went and looked up on the Mayo Clinic website the definition of that disorder and it fits Mr. Cheney to a T, inability to ever express remorse, to admit error, manipulative, dishonest.” 

Presidential nominees sometimes choose one of the candidates they defeated during primary/caucus season as their running mate for the general election. In that tradition, the Washington Monthly's D.R. Tucker recommends that Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s the Democratic nominee, name Bernie Sanders to the ticket, adding that Hillary “would have to signal that [Sanders] would be something of a co-President, the progressive answer to Dick Cheney.”

Tucker sneered that “a Clinton-Sanders ticket would, of course, put the American right on suicide watch” and asserted that if the two were elected, it would “finally put the corpse of Reaganism into the ground once and for all. Sanders is the living refutation of Reaganism, and the Vice Presidency would provide an effective bully pulpit to push back against the false arguments made by those who still worship the false idol who was the 40th president of the United States.”

Monday was a big day for journalists to suggest similarities between mass murderers and Republicans. Newsweek writer Nina Burleigh claimed that certain of Timothy McVeigh’s “militia ideals have gone mainstream” in the GOP, but Esquire's Pierce really put the ideological pedal to the metal when he likened Dick Cheney to one of the all-time worst genocidal maniacs, opining that Cheney’s relatively high current political profile is akin to “giving Pol Pot a late-night TV gig.” (As a lead-in, Pierce also called Cheney “the most inexcusable American who ever lived.”)

Pierce’s item piggybacked on a Washington Monthly post by Ed Kilgore, whose tone toward Cheney was not much less harsh than Pierce’s. After quoting Reince Priebus’s remark that Cheney is “a top fundraising draw, in high demand,” Kilgore sniped, “I suppose this is an example of what the church calls the ‘glamor of evil’ in the Easter baptismal renewal vows."