Dick Cheney, Mr Tedious

Are we surprised that Dick Cheney thinks George Bush went soft in the second term? This may be the least surprising thing I've read in ages. We knew at the time that foreign policy during the second Bush term was in essence a chess match between Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the former counseling unapologetic aggression, the latter a more ameliorative line.

That Cheney was unhappy, then, isn't really news. What is news, however, is that as Cheney sits down to prepare his memoirs, he's going to be telling more of his side of the story – and presumably taking more jibes at Bush – than we might have expected.

Someone with whom Cheney has been discussing his book told the Washington Post this morning: "[Cheney] 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."

Being Dick Cheney means never saying you're sorry. Never admitting a mistake. Never acknowledging that public opinion should have any influence whatsoever over what kind of policy a government pursues. You will recall the famous interview Cheney did with ABC News in March 2008, when the correspondent pointed out to him that two-thirds of the American public thought that the Iraq war hadn't been worth fighting, and Cheney replied with one word: "So?"

The way to p.r. salvation in an Oprah-fied culture is to sit on the national couch and admit that you've done wrong. Right now, as we speak, one of our country's most famous college basketball coaches (it's a huge sport here, and in the state where this happens to be unfolding, Kentucky, college basketball's status is such that the coach, Rick Pitino, is without question the most famous celebrity in the state) is in the middle of coming clean about an affair.

He got the woman pregnant and paid for her abortion (or he paid for her health insurance, with which she then purchased an abortion, depending on what you want to believe). That doesn't really matter. What matters is that Pitino came clean. He didn't go off to Argentina and say he was hiking. He admitted it all. The university said it's "a million percent" behind him. The controversy seems likely to end, with Pitino's rep oddly enhanced as an exemplar of menschkeit.

If Dick Cheney ever did anything like this, he'd just say: "So?" And people would think what they would think. And he wouldn't care. Cheney "gives no weight, close associates said, to his low approval ratings, to the tradition of statesmanlike White House exits or to the grumbling of Republicans about his effect on the party brand."

His defenders call this resolve. I call it megalomania. And I also call it tedious -- people who think they know the one true way, and everyone else is wrong, and history will prove them right, usually are. And he better think twice, really, about how much dirt he wants to dish on Bush. I know Cheney seems like the tough guy, but those Bushes didn't get where they are by being patsies. One of his loyalists ought to remind him what happened to John McCain in South Carolina in 2000, and hire him a good editor.

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