White House, Cheney: Sarcasm in the air

by Mark Silva

Sarcasm was making the rounds of Washington today.

Vice President Dick Cheney, whose address on national security was delayed somewhat by the delivery of President Barack Obama's own address on national security before it -- the president started late, and ran 49 minutes long in his talk at the National Archives -- opened with a joke about saying good afternoon instead of good morning.

"It's pretty clear that the president served in the Senate, and not the House of Representatives,'' Cheney, a former member of the House, told his audience at the American Enterprise Institute. "In the House, we have the five-minute rule.''

Of course, Cheney then went on for many minutes of his own with a speech filled with derision about the approach that his successors are taking to terrorism and sarcasm about others in Washington. Apparently, he said, the use of the word "war'' in connection with "terrorism'' is now "considered a bit dated.'' The suggestion that past American practices in the interrogation of terrorists have become recruitment tools for new terrorists, he said, is a "mantra'' that even the president has taken to using -- "another version of that same old phrase from the left, 'we brought it on ourselves.'''

The White House was asked what it made of Cheney's speech, and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs indeed repeated the assertion that the past practices of interrogation which the Obama White House has banned -- such as waterboarding -- had become nothing but recruitment tools for terrorism. He also noted that the former vice president, making a lot of speeches lately, has "got free time on his hands.'' Asked if this was some judgment on Cheney's speech, Gibbs said, no, and he couldn't begin to talk about the former vice president's motivations for making it. "I'm sarcastic by nature,'' Gibbs said.

But then again, things don't always go as scripted.

In his opening remarks at the Archives, Obama acknowdged his Cabinet members in attendance: "We've got our Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. We have our CIA Director Leon Panetta. We have our Secretary of Defense William Gates, Secretary Napolitano of Department of Homeland Security, Attorney General Eric Holder...''

That's Robert Gates at Defense, with a budget of more than $500 billion.

Bill Gates runs Microsoft, with annual revenues of more than $60 billion.

Sarcasm is infectious.

(Photo at top of Robert Gates, secretary of defense, by Harz N. Ghanbari / AP. Photo below of Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft, by Nati Harnik / AP)