Will Vice President Dick Cheney Be Forced To Resign Now?

[Ed. note: Cross-posted to our national blog, Cut to the Chase.]

From some of the word out of the opening day of testimony at the Scooter Libby/PlameGate/CIA Spy Leak trial comes some of the first serious questioning of whether Cheney's (bad?) actions will result in his resignation.

From Crooks & Liars (and see my previous posts on this topic here and here today):

Considering that Patrick Fitzgerald has clearly outlined a trail that leads right to the office of the Vice President, the obvious question hangs in the air: If this whole CIA leak case was authored by Cheney, does he need to resign?

Digby: Holy Moly

Norah O'Donnell is asking Andy Card and Leon Panetta if the president is going to have to ask Dick Cheney to resign as a result of what's being alleged at the Libby Trial. (They both punted.)

If that's the beltway chatter, look for the Republican noise machine to go into high gear.

Beware of Mary Matalin's upcoming appearances, I'm just sayin'…

The timing of this really couldn't be worse. On the day of Bush's State of the Union speech, you have a former senior official pointing fingers at your closest advisor, a Republican prosecutor pointing fingers at your Vice President, and polls that show that two-thirds of Americans have given up not only on his plan for Iraq but on his presidency.

Ironically, in the same breath, Republican pollster Frank Lutz told Democrats they had to play nice now that they are in the majority in Washington (Luntz sang a much different tune when Republicans were in power!):

GOP pollster Frank Luntz has been advising conservative Republicans for years on how to exploit language to smear Dems and win elections. It was Luntz, for example, who teamed up with Newt Gingrich to shape the Contract with America in 1994.

And now, Luntz has taken to the pages of the Huffington Post to offer the left some advice: don’t act like his Republican clients.

I am not in the habit of offering partisan linguistic advice to Democrats. But in the genuine spirit of bipartisanship - seriously - I thought this is the perfect time to convey a simple point to the still-euphoric faces of Democrat activists: Don’t twist the knife. […]

Democracy is at its best when its practioners use language to unite and explain rather than divide and attack…. We need an intelligent debate, not a sound-bite contest.

Given Luntz's record, this just doesn't make any sense.

I think playing nice and decent should be the norm, regardless of who is in power. But all we got was nastiness and a war of sound bites, with Republicans telling Dems they might as well go home and twiddle their thumbs because they were in charge for years.