Dick Cheney Is Frantically Looking For a Bus

Because he really, really is about to throw Dubya under it as part of his book tour.

Cheney's disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain -- and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney's critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.

That loud clicking sound you're hearing is the circular Republican firing squad taking aim at each other. While they may be doing a great job of stalling the President's agenda, they still have to convince the American people that one of them deserves to be in charge, and before they can do that, they have to settle the problem of who is taking the fall for the last eight years. Cheney is staking out Bush as the bad guy, and if you think he's doing out of anything other than to save his own ass, you're crazy.

Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney's intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney's book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that "the statute of limitations has expired" on many of his secrets. "When the president made decisions that I didn't agree with, I still supported him and didn't go out and undercut him," Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. "Now we're talking about after we've left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don't have any reason not to forthrightly express those views."

Liz Cheney, whom friends credit with talking her father into writing the book, described the memoir as a record for posterity. "You have to think about his love of history, and when he thinks about this memoir, he thinks about it as a book his grandchildren will read," she said.

Sure they'll read how Grandpa Dick would have saved the country for Republicans if it hadn't been for that damn Dubya idiot. And after all, if Dick can't clear his own name, how is Liz Cheney going to run on it?

It's not Sarah Palin Democrats have to worry about down the road, you know.