Bush's Unleashed Dog Dilemmas

"And there I was, former president of the United States of America, with a plastic bag on my hand," George W. Bush told high-school students yesterday about having to clean up after his dog Barney relieved himself in a neighbor's yard.

When he shares a stage with Bill Clinton next week, will anyone in the audience ask Bush about the mess that his attack dog Cheney is making in Washington?

Compared to the former vice president, Barney is a model of loyalty, according to David Brooks in today's New York Times:

"When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public a lot of the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way."

As Cheney goes rabid against the Obama Administration, Bush loyalists are anxious to point out the vice president's declining influence during their second term in the White House.

Writing about "The Cheney Fallacy," former White House Counsel Jack Goldsmith disputes his claims that Obama has reversed Bush policies and argues, "The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation."

More and more, the current brouhaha is looking not like Cheney vs. Obama, but Cheney vs. Bush and recalling the old saying, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."

But only as long as you can keep him on a leash.