Denial is a river in Africa. It's also at the White House, where Dick Cheney is holding onto his toys so heartily that when you try to pull the teddy bear out of his hands you end up dragging him down the hallway like a dog who won't let go of his favorite blanket.

Cheney was interviewed by ABC News about global warming. The vice president is a guy who had made a lot of money in his career and is not about to spoil the fun for anyone else. If there's money to be made, then there's money to be made. Environmental controls hurt profits, and we can't have that.

For this reason, he cannot come to grips with the most pressing problem facing planet Earth. A guy who literally made up scare stories about Iraq's supposed threat to world peace cannot accept documented claims that human activity is causing global warming. A guy who said that bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein were good friends has not read the latest scientific report on global warming. So we get interviews like this:

JONATHAN KARL: Where is the science on this? Is global warming a fact? And is it human activity that is causing global warming?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Those are the two key questions. I think there’s an emerging consensus that we do have global warming. You can look at the data on that, and I think clearly we’re in a period of warming. Where there does not appear to be a consensus, where it begins to break down, is the extent to which that’s part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it’s caused by man, greenhouse gases, et cetera.

No consensus on the cause of global warming? Dick, put away your comic books and do some real reading. As Associated Press recently reported:

The world's top climate scientists said on Friday global warming was man-made, spurring calls for urgent government action to prevent severe and irreversible damage from rising temperatures.

The United Nations panel, which groups 2,500 scientists from more than 130 nations, predicted more droughts, heatwaves, rains and a slow gain in sea levels that could last for more than 1,000 years.

The scientists said it was "very likely" -- or more than 90 percent probable -- that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the warming in the past 50 years.

That is a toughening from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) last report in 2001, which judged a link as "likely," or 66 percent probable.

Let's face it folks, we were duped. Well, at least some of us were. I didn't vote for Bush-Cheney, but a lot of people did. They thought these guys could at least look at a stapler and say it was a stapler. Instead, Cheney looks at a stapler and says it's a fish tank.