So there he was, Dick Cheney, the Vice President, in a surprise visit to Afghanistan.  Suddenly there was a bombing attack at the base he was at:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2907390

 A suicide bomber struck at the main entrance to Bagram air base in Afghanistan today, as Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting.

Immediately after the attack, a red alert traveled throughout the base — a red alert that we heard saying that the base was under direct attack.

At least nine people were killed, officials tell ABC News. Associated Press reporters at the scene said that they had seen the bodies of at least 12 people, and that they had been carried in black body bags and wooden coffins from near the base into a market area where hundreds of Afghans had gathered to mourn.

A Taliban spokesperson has claimed responsibility, saying the intended target was in fact Cheney. The bomber never got near Cheney.

Conservatives are outraged, as they should.  This was an assassination attempt against our government, if the Taliban reports are to be believed.  Had that been Al Gore in 1996 in Bosnia or somewhere, the left would have reacted with similar and understandable outrage.  In Cheney's case, the response was predictable:  Disappointment.

The nutroots at Kos and Democrat Underground were awash with commentary expressing their unhappiness he was still alive.

Now, let me be clear.  This is not a new trend, and is not a surprise.  But it is still a sad state of affairs for Liberal America that the second highest rankling political leader could have such a close call, and all they can do is lament the ineptitude of the bomber.

But there was a slightly unique response at HuffPo.  The web masters first closed the comments after the barrage of hate spewing diatribes, and they they went as far as to delete the worst comments altogether.  See the details at Michelle Malkin.

This is unheard of.   They left has never shrinked from its outrageous rhetoric.  If anything it glorified in it, the more outrageous the better.

To see them actually intervene is somewhat surprising, to say the least. 

Could they have learned something from John Edwards?  When he hired an openly anti catholic blogger, the outcry against her highly offensive writing was immediate.  Has HuffPo sought to present a more moderate image to the mainstream?

PM discusses the story here.

One school of thought seems to see it as a cover up, an way to hide that dirty side under a veneer of civility. 

The comments now visible are evidently cherry-picked out of the original thread to give some sort of “tone” to the thread that it did not originally possess. It is really amazing what you can do to history with just a few strokes of the keyboard.

Now it is one thing to close comments, another thing to erase them, but something else altogether different to actually “edit” the thread to give a false impression. That seems to be what has been done here. To what purpose and on whose orders is not known.

So far, the nearly 400 commenter's whose words have been erased from The Huffington Post are, well, “unavailable for comment.”

In that regard this is indeed an active effort to censor the comments, and only the editors at HuffPo know why.

My optimistic and altruistic sides wants to believe that common decency prevailed.

My cynical side insists otherwise.  It insists that this is an attempt to present a moderate face for political gain.

Could be.

But my practical side hopes that the debate over why they censored the comments does not overshadow the importance of what happened in the first place.

Lost in all the shouting is how they (the Taliban) knew Cheney was there, and questions of our overall security in Afghanistan. 

What happened there is serious and needs to be kept in focus.  Let's keep our eyes on the ball please.

Also at Sister Toldjah and a bazillion other places.

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