Dick Cheney had a personal interaction with a citizen in Colorado way back in 2006. The fallout from that interaction has been intermittently newsworthy ever since. The man was arrested. The charges were dropped. He filed a wrongful arrest suit. The secret servicemen told conflicting stories when deposed. One of them, the officer that is at odds with Cheney’s personal detail, has been transfered to Guam.

Yesterday, the news was that Cheney’s lawyers are seeking to block the public release of deposition videos on the unspoken grounds that they will go viral in remixed form on YouTube (watch for them). It’s quite a tangled mess and it is all the result of what some people say was just an insincere pat on the back. Oh, and a verbal indictment of the administration’s Iraq policy.

Steven Howards is like a much older and MUCH smarter version of that guy that got tasered. And in case Cheney or his security detail has any ideas, it is TOO LATE to taser Steven now. Actually, my comparison might be a little bit of a stretch. I don’t think he intended to make a scene. I can remember a moment in my own life where I was face to face with a politician with whom I strongly disagreed. I didn’t seize on the opportunity to speak my mind. I was still young and I probably didn’t have any nuanced criticism to voice. It was at the airport where I was working summers in my college days. Actually, I was doing my daily 2 hours of picking up garbage and I had a pointy tool and a bucket in my hands. The political leader of my Canadian province was standing outside the terminal having a smoke. Our personal interaction involved eye contact and nodding.