That sign probably represented the harshest take on Cheney's record that TV viewers saw during the PR campaign for his book.

Unsurprisingly, it caught someone's attention over at Fox News, and on Sunday host Chris Wallace decided to use it in a question about liberal media bias. That's not surprising. Cheney's response, though, is worth a look:

WALLACE: What do you make of that? I mean, I somehow doubt that if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were speaking, they would have taken the shot and then suddenly have person with a sign would have been putting their pictures in.  Simply, do you think there is a liberal bias in the mainstream media?

CHENEY: I think there probably is. But I don't spend time worrying it. I think those of us right-thinking conservatives find that there are a lot of outlets out there now in the media, on the Internet, that give us ample opportunity for our points of view to get across and to be heard.

You hear this every so often from powerful conservatives like William Kristol and Pat Buchanan. I guess it's hard for people who spend their lives pontificating on national television to faithfully recite their team's talking points about a media system that is apparently allergic to their point of view.

On NBC's Meet the Press, Obama national security adviser Thomas Donilon basically refused to take a definitive position on torture, waterboarding and intelligence.  "No single piece of intelligence led to this," was his line. They followed up with a segment with former CIA head Michael Hayden and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom basically endorsed the idea that torture worked.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Donald Rumsfeld declared that these tactics worked.

Fox News Sunday had an "exclusive" with Dick Cheney, which followed a pretty contentious interview with Donilon. Cheney did not surprise.

On ABC's This Week, torture advocate Liz Cheney was on the roundtable to say exactly what you'd expect.  ("That debate is over. It worked. It got the intelligence. It wasn't torture. It was legal.")  This came after host Christiane Amanpour seemed to overstate the White House's view, saying that that Obama officials have admitted that waterboarding "did, in fact, yield fruitful information in the hunt for Osama bin Laden."

But give ABC credit for having a  critic of torture on their show.  Former Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks said this:

I never thought I'd live in a country where we would debate whether we should endorse torture as an official policy. Was some information obtained through torture? Probably yeah. Could it have been obtained through more professional methods the intelligence professionals recommended? Almost certainly yes. We could have gotten it sooner and better.

Also, what we know is that the use of torture became the prime recruiting tool for Al Qaida and for insurgents in Iraq, and so directly resulted in the death of American troops.

If I taught at the Kennedy School, I would take these two speeches as ur-text of partisan rhetoric. I think it was a brilliant tactical night, one of the most brilliant in the age of television. These were two concise, rather devastating rhetorical hits at John Kerry. And there was just--they did not miss a base. They did not miss anything that they could hit.

The remarkable thing about those two speeches was their breathtaking dishonesty. (See "If Only They Had Invented the Internet," FAIR Media Advisory, 9/3/04.) Those were the speeches in which Miller and Cheney claimed that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was opposed to all U.S. weapon systems, had promised to give the U.N. a veto over U.S. military action, and so on--all blatant falsehoods.  If you saw that non-stop parade of lies as "brilliant," then maybe it's not so surprising that you would be looking forward to Dick Cheney running for president.

That's what you have to wonder when you see a lawyer for the Obama administration's Justice Department arguing that statements made by former Vice President Dick Cheney in the Scooter Libby probe ought to be kept secret because a future vice president might refuse to speak to a future investigation out of concern "that it's going to get on the Daily Show" (Washington Post, 6/19/09).

Really?  That's how we're going to ensure that officials cooperate with criminal investigations, by using government secrecy to guarantee that their statements will never be subjected to criticism in the media? Yes, that's the plan, according to "career civil division lawyer" Jeffrey M. Smith.

Here's an alternate plan: How about instead we allow the media to criticize and even satirize the statements of public officials, and make sure that officials cooperate with criminal investigations by subpoenaing them if they refuse to do so? Nope--that would be "unseemly," according to Smith.

It does make you wonder what they're teaching in constitutional law classes--particularly at the University of Chicago.