There has never been a vice president -- ever (and even including Spiro Agnew who was Nixon's) -- who needed to be investigated more than Cheney. Nor has there ever been such a secretive vice president. Dick Cheney is the power behind the Bush throne. Frankly, I am baffled why the mainstream news media has given Cheney (not to mention Bush) a free ride. I don't know if it is generational, or corporate ownership, or political bias, but it is clear that Cheney has been given a pass by the major news organizations.

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Dick Cheney is a political disaster awaiting recognition. In the book [Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush], I set forth a relatively long list of inchoate scandals, not to mention problems worse than scandals. They all involve Cheney in varying degrees. Bush can't dump Cheney, for it is Cheney, not Rove, who is Bush's backroom brain. He is actually a co-president. Bush doesn't enjoy studying and devising policy. Cheney does. While Cheney has tutored Bush for almost four years, and Bush is better prepared today than when he entered the job, Cheney is quietly guiding this administration. Cheney knows how to play Bush so that Cheney is absolutely no threat to him, makes him feel he is president, but Bush can't function without a script, or without Cheney. Bush is head of state; Cheney is head of government.

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I quote Cheney from his time in the Ford White House when he said, "Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose." I think this statement sums up Cheney's thinking nicely.

And he makes an interesting observation about Bush and his relationship to Rove:

All candidates control their campaigns, and if they don't want such activity [like the ugly tactics used aganst John McCain in 2000 and now in play against Kerry], it doesn't occur. As I discovered in talking to people about Bush, he is a highly sophisticated political operator. I've noted in the book that Rove gets the credit for being Bush's political brain. It's an arrangement both men like, because it raises Rove's importance as a political operator, and lowers Bush's exposure. In truth, Bush is probably more politically savvy than Rove. Both men learned their politics from Lee Atwater, who ran Bush senior's 1988 campaign. Atwater made dirty politics into an art form, by which I mean he provided those for whom dirty deeds were done deniability while Atwater's people tore up an opponent's pea-patch and everything else. I expect the 2004 presidential campaign to make Richard Nixon look like a high-road campaigner.

So, another couple of data points in the ongoing quest to figure out whether Bush is actually in charge or just a figurehead. Things get complex because Cheney is, in Dean's view, "co-president" and yet Bush is, again as Dean sees it, in some sense in charge when it comes to politics, not Rove.

That makes a certain amount of sense, because a lot of "political savvy" we refer to as "instinct," but is actually not instinctual at all, it consists of ideas, tropes and techniques you can easily take in by osmosis when you're surrounded by politics all your life, as Bush was. The other stuff, the things that Cheney seems to be responsible for, actually take some specfic knowledge and grasp of information outside of the realm of pure politics. But I doubt that the dividing line is so bright and clear as that, especially given the thesis that most of the administration's failures and scandals have Cheney dead in the center of them, raising the question if the Bush administration's incompetency is really Cheney's incompetency, as Josh Marshall suggested not too long ago.

Dean is asked why the Bush-Cheney White House hasn't (yet) produced a John Dean figure who cracks open the secrecy of the place through whistle-blowing, and his answer is pretty inconclusive. I wonder if the difference isn't inherent in the disaparate personalities of Bush and Nixon.

Loyalty is such a overwhelmingly important thing to the Bushes, and Bush (the son) is able to project (at least for some people -- most of my friends can barely stand to watch him on TV or listen to him speak) an uncomplicated and friendly persona that encourages people to give that loyalty willingly. (That's the carrot, the stick being the example of what happens when you're disloyal and reveal that the Emperor not only has no clothes but he's also a little funny in the head.) Nixon may have also valued loyalty as much, but I don't think he had the personality to command it in the same way that Bush can, although he obviously had the personality to enforce it when necessary.