Cheney's ignorance on display... again

This hardly classifies as news any longer - Shooter Cheney is making an ass out of himself again. The latest installment came yesterday at a gathering in West Virginia. WaPo's Mary Ann Akers:

During a question-and-answer session toward the end of the luncheon, someone asked the vice president about his wife Lynne Cheney's revelation on MSNBC last year that "Dick and Barack Obama are eighth cousins."

The questioner jokingly asked the vice president if he and Obama were going to have a family reunion, to which Cheney replied he would "have no objections" though he said he doubted Obama would want one - "certainly not before November."

Then came the offensive punch line. Cheney explained that during the course of researching his family lineage for Lynne's memoir "Blue Skies, No Fences" last year, he learned there were Cheneys on both his father's and his mother's side of the family. There was a Richard Cheney on his mother's side, the vice president said.

"So I had Cheneys on both sides of the family and we don't even live in West Virginia," Cheney quipped.

West Virginia politicians aren’t laughing at Cheney’s little joke, including his fellow Republican, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.)

Who knew a Dick could be this funny?

Seriously, I've little to no idea why West Virginians would even consider voting for John McCain in the general election this November. Any fair minded political observer would probably draw only one conclusion - race. I know, I know, it's not PC to say, but I don't care - I think it's the truth.

Considering that West Virginia ranks in the bottom five in the country in just about every conceivable income category (According to the 2000 Census), what other conclusion could one draw? I find it impossible to believe that the state's working poor could look to John McCain (or George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, for that matter) to improve their lot in life. It's not like the last eight years have been boom times for West Virginia, that's for sure. However, the Bush administration has been in bed with the coal industry since day one of Bush's presidency, so that undoubtedly plays a party in Bush's popularity in the state.

Anyway, draw your own conclusions.

P.S. - Cheney's spokeswoman offered an apology after his office received complaints about his ignorant remarks. One more thought - you'd think that the Cheney family, considering that they have a gay daughter, would have an appreciation for diversity and for people who are cut from a different cloth than they are, especially considering hypocrite Lynne Cheney's crazed reaction to John Kerry merely mentioning in 2004 what everyone already knew, that the Cheneys have a gay daughter. (And then there's Dick's barking at Wolf Blitzer for a question about his daughter Mary.) These people don't have a good track record of being tolerant when people point out the obvious about their family, much less making jokes about it, so I wonder how the Cheneys would have reacted about a joke about their family? Well, let's not let facts get in the way.