Waving handcuffs in the air and shouting that the former vice president is a “war criminal,” a Code Pink protester yesterday rose from the audience to disrupt a public Politico interview of the Cheney family. That sort of thing isn't unusual for Pink. But just as security was escorting the woman out, C-SPAN’s live feed of the event went dead. An announcer said they were having technical difficulties, and C-SPAN eventually switched to another program, leaving the ongoing heckling of the Cheneys out of its live feed.

Was the transmission fail deliberate sabotage or simply an exquisitely timed accident? C-SPAN certainly didn't cut the feed on purpose, a spokesman says, adding, "It was technical, not editorial." And Politico, which sponsored the event with Mike Allen running the interview, wasn't trying to block out the protest–nothing was cut from its own online feed, a spokeswoman says..

But whatever the cause, the fade-to-black was briefly reminiscent of the final episode of The Sopranos, when the crime boss’s family (minus the daughter, Meadow, who was running late) gathered at a diner, under the gaze of ominous-looking characters, and the screen suddenly went blank. Yesterday, the Cheney family—minus one daughter, Mary, who’s been supremely pissed at Liz for opposing same-sex marriages like Mary’s own—gathered at the Politico Playbook luncheon, under the gaze of protesters (and undoubtedly others who can’t stand them), when the screen went mysteriously dark.

The Cheney sit-down started out normally enough, with Dick Cheney chuckling about how “when the family is alone—Liz and Mary and Lynne and I—we usually end up telling war stories about campaigns we were involved in. It’s always funny, it always involves train wrecks. The funniest political stories are the train wrecks, and we had a lot train wrecks along the way.”

Note how the war stories were about campaigns, not about the actual war that was the largest political train wreck in modern history.

Lynne cracked that she and Dick weren’t “dead broke” when he became veep, and Mike Allen had barely begun plugging Lynne’s latest book when the protester began shouting them down. Lynne responded by laughing heartily and Liz, more embarrassingly, by clapping her hands and chanting, “Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!”

As you can see in the full, uncut video that C-SPAN ran later yesterday and today, the protest went on for quite a while, as a second woman from Code Pink nearly drowned out the Cheneys, shouting, “You destroyed Iraq and you’re destroying this country!” Security also removed her from the room (neither woman was arrested or fined, according to the New York Daily News).

With the danger soon gone, the Cheneys blabbed on about the grandeur that was Iraq when Cheney left office, the evils of Obama, and everything they’ve been blabbing about for their years-long restoration tour.

Unlike the Sopranos, the Cheneys were able to return.