From The Boston Globe, 8/26/06:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/08/26/the_cheney_presidency/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Editorial%2FOp-ed+pages

The Cheney presidency

By Robert Kuttner

GEORGE W. BUSH has been faulted in some quarters for taking an
extended vacation while the Middle East festers.

It doesn't much matter; the man running the country is Vice President
***** Cheney.

When historians look back on the multiple assaults on our
constitutional system of government in this era, Cheney's
unprecedented role will come in for overdue notice.

Cheney's shotgun mishap, when he accidentally sprayed his host with
birdshot, has gotten more media attention than has his control of the
government.

Historically, the vice president's job was to ceremonially preside
over the Senate, attend second-tier foreign funerals, and be prepared
for the president to die.

Students are taught that John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's first
vice president, compared the job to a bucket of warm spit (and
historians say spit was not the word the pungent Texan actually used).

Recent vice presidents Walter Mondale and Al Gore were given more
authority than most, but there was no doubt that the president was in
charge.

Cheney is in a class by himself.

The administration's grand strategy and its implementation are the
work of Cheney-- sometimes Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, sometimes Cheney and political director Karl Rove.

Cheney has planted aides in major Cabinet departments, often over the
objection of a Cabinet secretary, to make sure his policies are
carried out.

He sits in on the Senate Republican caucus, to stamp out any
rebellions.

Cheney loyalists from the Office of the Vice President dominate
interagency planning meetings.

The Iraq war is the work of Cheney and Rumsfeld.

The capture of the career civil service is pure Cheney.

The disciplining of Congress is the work of Cheney and Rove.

The turning over of energy policy to the oil companies is Cheney.

The extreme secrecy is Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

If Cheney were the president, more of this would be smoked out because
the press would be paying attention.

The New York Times' acerbic columnist Maureen Dowd regularly makes
sport of Cheney's dominance, and there are plenty of jokes (Bush is a
heartbeat away from the presidency).

But you can count serious newspaper or magazine articles on Cheney's
operation on the fingers of one hand.

One exceptional example is Jane Mayer's piece in the July 3 New Yorker
on Cheney operative David Addington .

Cheney's power is matched only by his penchant for secrecy.

When my colleague at the American Prospect, Robert Dreyfuss, requested
the names of people who serve on the vice president's staff, he was
told this was classified information.

Former staffers for other departments provided Dreyfuss with names.

So secretive is Cheney (and so incurious the media) that when his
chief of staff, Irving Lewis Libby, was implicated in the leaked
identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, reporters who rushed to
look Libby up on Nexis and Google found that Libby had barely rated
previous press attention.

Why does this matter?

Because if the man actually running the government is out of the
spotlight, the administration and its policies are far less
accountable.

When George W. Bush narrowly defeated John Kerry in 2004, many
commentators observed that Bush was the fellow with whom you would
rather have a beer.

It's an accurate and unflattering comment on the American electorate
-- but then who wants to have a beer with Cheney?

The public may not know the details of his operation, but voters
intuitively recoil from him.

Bush's popularity ratings are now under 40 percent, beer or no,
reflecting dwindling confidence in where he is taking the country.

But Cheney's ratings are stuck around 20 percent, far below that of
any president.

If Cheney were the actual president, not just the de facto one, he
simply could not govern with the same set of policies and approval
ratings of 20 percent.

The media focuses relentless attention on the president, on the
premise that he is actually the chief executive.

But for all intents and purposes, Cheney is chief, and Bush is more in
the ceremonial role of the queen of England.

Yet the press buys the pretense of Bush being ``the decider," and
relentlessly covers Bush -- meeting with world leaders, cutting brush,
holding press conferences, while Cheney works in secret, largely
undisturbed.

So let's take half the members of the overblown White House press
corps, which has almost nothing to do anyway, and send them over to
Cheney Boot Camp for Reporters.

They might learn how to be journalists again, and we might learn who
is running the government.

_________________________________________________________

The existence of the "Cheney Presidency" isn't a mystery to most of
us.

Harry