Friendly advice to President George Bush: More than ever before, don’t accept an invitation form former Vice President Dick Cheney to go hunting.
Once upon a short time ago, Bush and Cheney were considered a mega-powerful White House duo like this. But since they left office, some pundits suggest they were more like this, this or even this.
In recent weeks Cheney eschewed the common (but not always) tradition of former administration officials who give new Presidential administrations a new chance — even if staffed by political foes who they don’t respect — by blasting the Obama administration before it hit the month-long anniversary mark for being soft on terrorism and likely leaving the U.S. open to a catastrophic terrorist attack.
But now Cheney is letting it be known that he is also displeased with someone else: George W. Bush, because Bush wouldn’t do his bidding and pardon a ‘bud. It’s a tantrum by news leak:
Dick Cheney spent his final days as vice president making a furious last-ditch effort to secure a pardon for his onetime chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., leaving him at odds with former President George W. Bush on a matter of personal loyalty as the two moved on to private life, according to several former officials.
These kinds of stories don’t just happen — they are released by someone to make a point and make something known.
The officials said Tuesday that Mr. Cheney’s lobbying campaign on behalf of Mr. Libby was far more intense than previously known, with the vice president bringing it up in countless one-on-one conversations with the president. They said Mr. Bush was unyielding to the end, already frustrated by a deluge of last-minute pardon requests from other quarters.
The dispute underscored the raw feelings of Mr. Cheney and other supporters of Mr. Libby, who believed that he was mistreated by prosecutors and ill served by a president who, in their view, failed to return Mr. Libby’s loyalty and sacrifice.
And it points up the distance said to have grown between the two men as their worldviews, once largely in sync, seemed increasingly to diverge in their second term as Mr. Bush took a less hawkish stance.
For Mr. Cheney, the failure to win a pardon was a stinging loss that led him to offer a rare public rebuke of Mr. Bush’s judgment, saying of Mr. Libby in an interview with The Weekly Standard last month that “I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon,” and that “I disagree with President Bush’s decision.”
What’s up with Cheney? What isn’t.
Since being appointed to head GWB’s search for a Vice President, a search that somehow ended with Cheney himself being coincidentally selected (nice work if you can get it), Cheney has been perceived as (a) a father figure to Bush (who didn’t get totally along with his own Dad), (b) a manipulative figure who used Bush’s pliability and desire to be the anti-Bush41 to become the motor of major change causing the Bush administration to break from Clinton era and other administrations of both parties’ foreign policy and civil liberty norms and values, (c) a baby boomer mentally infected by his polarizing formative era who was determined to roll back the clock and strip away constraints on the executive branch stemming from the LBJ and Nixon administration fiascos, (d) an authentic realist who didn’t get and doesn’t get enough credit for the way he prepared the U.S. for all too possible worst-case scenarios and who still gets no credit for how well-protected the U.S. was on his vigilant watch, (e) a politico who had a safe Congressional seat so he didn’t care a fig for polls or opponents or even other members of Congress (he once swore at one which coined the popular expression “Go Cheney yourself..”).
Or any combination and nuances thereof…
What is certain is that the leaks aren’t being thrown down by thunderbolts from A Higher Power (Rush Limbaugh is too busy with his broadcast these days..). They’re from the Cheney camp or barbs from Cheney — and they sound angry and petulant and pouting. And seething.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd thinks GWB had started to distance himself from the man credited blamed said to have contributed to some of his administration’s biggest problems, rather than solid solutions:
One of the great mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether W. ever had an epiphany when he realized that he had been manipulated by Dick Cheney, whether it ever hit him that he had trusted the wrong father figure.
There were clues in the last couple of years that W. and Condi were trying to sidle away from Cheney by using the forbidden strategy of diplomacy in dealing with Iran and North Korea, and by cutting loose Rummy.
As one official who worked closely with both W. and Cheney told The New York Daily News’s Tom DeFrank the last week of the administration: “It’s been a long, long time since I’ve heard the president say, ‘Run that by the vice president’s office.’ You used to hear that all the time.”
…. The clearest sign of disaffection we have is Bush’s refusal to pardon Scooter Libby, the man known as “Cheney’s Cheney,” despite Vice’s tense and emotional pleading. It was his final, too little, too late “You are not the boss of me” spurning of Dick Cheney.
It may seem pointless for W. to worry about his legacy at this juncture, but he clearly did not want to add a Marc Rich blot to all the other gigantic blots on the copybook.
After recapping the myriad leaks and outright expressions of disapproval from Cheney in recent weeks about the Libby non-pardon, Dowd adds:
By not pardoning Cheney’s alter ego, who plied his dark arts trying to discredit Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and then lied to protect his boss, W. was clearly saying he thought that Libby, and by extension Cheney, did something wrong.
But it’s not clear whether W. is simply pouting because Cheney’s machinations blackened his legacy, or if, at long last, he fathoms the morality of it, that Cheney did hideous things to the Constitution — not to mention that goat devil.
Partisans will (and do) debate Cheney, using the filter of their own partisan viewpoints, and “score points” agendas.
But historians already aren’t treating Bush too well.
And it’s likely that when they get to Cheney, he’ll then have something to really pout about.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.