Have you noticed that when Lynne Cheney thunders about being an “indignant mother” she can’t repress a smile? And when husband Dick says he’s an “angry father,” he’s smirking?

That’s because they’re actually far more pleased than outraged by John Kerry’s mention of their daughter’s sexual orientation in the last debate. Now they have an issue to distract the country from George Bush’s awful debate performances. And the media, which drank deeply from Cheney’s WMD concoction, has once again swallowed his deceptions–hook, line, and sinker.

It was Dick Cheney himself, who first brought up his daughter’s lesbianism in the 2000 Vice-Presidential debate when he wanted to burnish his compassionate side, a quality never noticed much before and completely absent since. When John Edwards mentioned Cheney’s daughter in this year’s VP debate, Cheney thanked him for his “kind words.”

But within moments after the third debate between Bush and Kerry, Lynne Cheney was ready with a canned line of faux-indignation to feed the post-debate news shows. It’s now morphed into an applause line in both mom and pop’s campaign speeches. This isn’t parental outrage; it is political theater from two of the most cynical people in American politics, and they have successfully manipulated the mainstream media once again.