Fingers-in-the-Dikes Presidency

Nobody seems to be blinking as the world economy bursts another seam, in Dubai this time, accentuating again how much Barack Obama's tenure in the White House has been like a montage of the little Dutch boy racing from dike to dike trying to hold off disasters--on Wall Street and Main Street, in Detroit, Afghanistan, the ozone layer, wherever.

Watery images are on Peggy Noonan's mind as she observes that the President is now "leaking support" in "two core constituencies, Washington's Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment."

But Noonan may be missing the point. Obama I is looking more and more like the Year of the Flood, with a President trying to hold back rising tides on all fronts in the kind of world not ideally suited to his political style as a transformational leader on big issues rather than a first responder to one emergency after another.

But the President has been scrambling for quick fixes, and some observers are declaring partial successes, as Jacob Weisberg does in Slate, crediting him with the best first year since FDR and citing "mounting evidence that the $787 billion economic stimulus he signed in February—-combined with the bank bailout package—-prevented an economic depression."

Be that as it may, next month Obama's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize will remind us that the fabled boy with his finger in the dike was Hans Brinker, who also competed for the Silver Skates and, through his good works, went on to become a successful healer.

Then again, for skeptics, there is another way to go, by joining the editor of Newsweek in urging Dick Cheney to run against Obama in 2012. As the waters keep rising, the former Veep could go back to doing what he did so well for eight years, shrugging and denying it all.

Dithering Before Sending Americans to Die

"I won’t risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary," the President said yesterday at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. "And if it's necessary, we will back you up to the hilt."

He was talking to men and women in uniform but answering an American who never wore one, Dick Cheney, who has accused him of "dithering" about sending more troops to Afghanistan during a speech at the Center for Security Policy last week to accept a "Keeper of the Flame Award."

It's not clear what flame the awarders had in mind, but the former Vice President, who has grown more overtly bellicose in his time out of office, was too busy with "other priorities in the 60's than military service" getting five deferments to avoid it during the Vietnam war but has been more than willing to risk others' lives as a bureaucrat ever since.

Sarah Palin has preempted the title, "Going Rogue," but Cheney is walking the walk as he offends everyone from John McCain to Orrin Hatch with those attacks on President Obama for "dithering" on Afghanistan.

After decades as the perfect behind-the-scenes factotum, he has now morphed into the runaway Republican who has no hesitation about sending more and more Americans to places where doubts are growing about US ability to win the so-called war on terrorism.

Cheney's nominal former boss, George W. Bush, has confined himself to giving inspirational speeches to crowds dancing to Beach Boy tunes, but the former VP no doubt considers that dithering while Rome burns.

Cheney's Contract Killers

A new leak in the Death Squad story first blurted out by Seymour Hersh discloses that the CIA in 2004 hired Blackwater "as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda."

According to current and former government officials, the New York Times reports that "Dick Cheney told CIA officers in 2002 that the spy agency did not need to inform Congress because the agency already had legal authority to kill Qaeda leaders."

In a March speech, New Yorker writer Hersh casually referred to "an executive assassination ring" operating out of Cheney's office: "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

Today's Times story reflects ongoing efforts by the CIA in the Obama era under Leon Panetta to scrape off all the accumulated Cheney mud of the post-9/11 years:

"Officials said the CIA did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune. Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior CIA officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.

"Blackwater, which has changed its name, most recently to Xe Services, and is based in North Carolina, in recent years has received millions of dollars in government contracts, growing so large that the Bush administration said it was a necessary part of its war operation in Iraq...

"Blackwater employees hired to guard American diplomats in Iraq were accused of using excessive force on several occasions, including shootings in Baghdad in 2007 in which 17 civilians were killed. Iraqi officials have since refused to give the company an operating license."

But apparently the Vice President of the United States had no compunctions about hiring them as assassins and hiding their activities from Congress.

Cheney, Rove and Sleeping Dogs

As the Bush Era recedes in the rear-view mirror, both friends and foes keep revisiting its glory days. The House Judiciary Committee makes public documents that show Karl Rove turning "law enforcement into a tool of partisan politics," and Dick Cheney wants it known that George W. Bush went soft on him in their second term and "turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end."

The former Vice President's rueful attitude will serve mainly to hype interest in his forthcoming memoirs, but the Rove revelations may affect the future of Bush's Brain in more drastic ways, with a New York Times editorial urging Congress to hold open hearings and the Justice Department to push its own investigation toward criminal charges in the firing of the US Attorneys:

"The materials released on Tuesday paint an ugly picture of fair-minded prosecutors under siege by the White House for refusing to politicize their offices. And it puts Mr. Rove, former President George W. Bush’s chief political operative, at the center of it."

The Obama Administration seems inclined to let sleeping dogs lie, but the Bush alumni show no signs of slinking off to snooze quietly.

Cheney is so incensed that his Presidential puppet fired his former mentor Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense after the 2006 elections and refused to pardon Scooter Libby for outing Valerie Plame before leaving office that he apparently can't wait for his memoirs to appear to vent his rage.

Rove, meanwhile, keeps savaging the Obama usurpers on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal, confident that he can escape prosecution in the US Attorney case by claiming he was only "a conduit" in the maneuverings to fire them.

In the days of raucous town halls about health reform, all this may get filed under the heading of stale news, but history will undoubtedly care.

Cheney's Quiet Coup

Last year's debate over whether the Vice President was part of the executive or legislative arm of government is being mooted by revelations that Dick Cheney was operating as a separate branch of his own.

Now we learn from Leon Panetta that he was running a secret counterterrorism program that the CIA withheld from Congress for eight years on his direct orders. Add this to Seymour Hersh's recent charge that Cheney had been running "an executive assassination ring...going into countries... and finding people on a list and executing them," and the picture emerges of a Vice President running his own post-9/11 war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

President Obama himself adds fuel to the fire in a CNN interview, telling Anderson Cooper that "the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001."

As much as the President and the rest of us want to put the Bush era to rest, the ghosts of Cheney's secret and illegal private war within the war on terror keep coming up and haunting us with questions of how much power one man can exercise unchecked in the administration of a president who calls himself the Decider but, where it counts, isn’t.

That past won't stay buried until we see it all fully and clearly.

Good-Cop, Bad-Copping Obama

With a decade of rehearsal, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have their act down pat--the regular guy who never raises his voice and his hair-trigger partner who chews the scenery. After weeks of shaking up by the Snarler, here is the former Decider to sooth our nerves.

Defending his torture policy as unequivocally as his vice president has done, Bush gave an audience of business people yesterday a spoonful of sugar with the reheated argument that, after checking with the lawyers, he only did what was legal and necessary and that "the information we got saved lives."

If Obama differs, Bush insists, he is not going to blame him (implicitly for not saving lives). "Nothing I am saying is meant to criticize my successor," he said. "There are plenty of people who have weighed in. Trust me, having seen it first-hand. I didn't like it when a former president criticized me, so therefore I am not going to criticize my successor. I wish him all the best."

Such fake "generosity" is even more grating than Cheney's outright attacks on Obama for making the country less safe, but it's par for the course in Bush's act as the good cop in their collaboration.

Asked what he would like his legacy to be, the 43rd president had a ready answer:

"The man showed up with a set of principles, and he was unwilling to compromise his soul for the sake of popularity."

Or reality.

Dueling Speeches and Ragtag Terrorists

The 9/11 world is back with full force as Barack Obama makes the case for a judicious approach to terrorism, Dick Cheney argues that only bare knuckles can keep us safe and New York police stage a perp walk of petty criminals scammed into believing they could bomb synagogues and shoot down Air National Guard planes.

It's one of those wake-me-when-it's-over days as the overloaded mind wants only to watch an old movie on TV or hide under the covers, but the dueling speeches and the terrorist bust are part of the way we live now. There is no escape.

For someone of advanced age, there are powerful echoes of the 1950s in all this--another era of anxiety about threats to "our way of life" from evil forces and politicians eager to exploit them with an easy sell of fear.

Dick Cheney is no Joe McCarthy, but here he is attacking the Obama Administration for closing Guantanamo with a desire "to bring some of these hardened terrorists into the United States" and praising Congressional exploitation of fears that "the terrorists might soon be relocating into their states," as if they were going to be walking the streets rather than being held in maximum-security prisons.

But Cheney's retroactive paean to torture, which has raised his approval ratings a few points from abysmal to awful, is less relevant than the President's attempt today to reconcile national ideals with what has to be done "to keep the American people safe."

Obama reviewed what he called the Guantanamo "mess--a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant, almost daily basis, and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country."

Along with a dissection of the legal and moral issues involved, the President, who prefers to focus on the future, nevertheless acknowledged the demagoguery of "fear-mongering" surrounding the issue.

"Listening to the recent debate," he said, "I've heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country."

As this rhetorical duel was going on, New York Police were illustrating the complexities of the post-9/11 world by arresting four would-be jihadists for an "aspirational" plot (translation: they had the desire to bomb and kill but apparently neither the brains nor means until authorities provided them with harmless "explosives" and fake surface-to-air missiles).

The sadness in all this what used to be "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" comedy is that it now has to be treated with dead seriousness since Osama bin Laden took away our innocence almost eight years ago.

A Powell Counterattack on Cheney

Last Sunday's sneer that he preferred Rush Limbaugh to Powell ("I didn't know he was still a Republican") has inspired a response to Dick Cheney from Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for Colin Powell, when he was Secretary of State.

In a blog post to The Washington Note, Wilkerson reveals that, starting in 2002, the torture Cheney is now defending "was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda."

In a full-bore counterattack, Powell's former aide describes Cheney's role in the demise of the party:

"He and Rush Limbaugh seem to be its leaders now. Lindsay Graham, John McCain, John Boehner, and all other Republicans of note seem to be either so enamored of Cheney-Limbaugh (or fearful of them?) or, on the other hand, so appalled by them, that the cat has their tongues. And meanwhile fewer Americans identify as Republicans than at any time since WWII. We're at 21% and falling--right in line with the number of cranks, reprobates, and loonies in the country.

"When will we hear from those in my party who give a damn about their country and about the party of Lincoln?

"When will someone of stature tell Dick Cheney that enough is enough? Go home. Spend your 70 million. Luxuriate in your Eastern Shore mansion. Shoot quail with your friends--and your friends.

"Stay out of our way as we try to repair the extensive damage you've done--to the country and to its Republican Party."

Colin Powell has too much dignity to swat Dick Cheney this way, but it's gratifying that someone has done it for him, his party and the rest of the country.

Cheney's Media Torture

After eight years in the Bush bunker, the former Vice-President is out waterboarding voters with interviews to make them confess that electing Barack Obama was a plot to subvert national security.

Dick Cheney capped his first hundred days as a voluble has-been with a "Face the Nation" appearance yesterday to illustrate Murray Kempton's classic definition of politicians as generals who watch the battle from afar and come down afterward to shoot the wounded.

His main target was a real general, Colin Powell, whose injuries leading up to the Iraq war were inflicted by Cheney's own twisted Scooter Libby intelligence used in Powell's speech to persuade the UN that Saddam Hussein had WMDs.

Asked to choose between Powell and Rush Limbaugh to represent Republican principles, Cheney did not hesitate to side with The Mouth, saying "my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican."

More and more, Cheney is looking like one of those Japanese soldiers discovered in caves long after World War II ended to emerge blinking in the daylight, convinced that their emperor was still on the throne. The difference is that they slunk off in silence, too shamed to be giving interviews.

Torturing Ourselves

The continuing national debate is getting more and more self-righteous as Americans look for absolutes in a world of moral murk.

Dick Cheney emerges from his psychic cave to insist that torture works, but he has no standing after eight years of secrecy and ruthlessness. Barack Obama tells us we are not the kind of people who torture on principle but refuses to punish those who did while believing they had a legal right to do so.

Now we are rooting through the moral wreckage for evidence of whether or not vile treatment of human beings can sometimes serve a greater good. Are those who insist that it never can and insist on punishing anyone who disagrees any less rigid than Cheney?

At 19, I was given a rifle and ordered to kill for my country against all my beliefs and three years later saw an American president command the only use of nuclear weapons in history to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children to save lives like mine in what would have been a bloody invasion of Japan.

Those experiences left me with a lifelong aversion to sanctimony on questions where life and death are involved. Even if the Cheney-minded can show that torture may sometimes produce useful information, does that justify its use as a policy? Even if those who disagree can refute those claims, does it justify their moral certitude?

The dangers of living in a world where rectitude is a zero-sum game (If I'm right, you must be wrong) are the greater threat to our humanity than the issue of torture as an abstraction in a world where, while recognizing ambiguity and ambivalence, nonetheless taking a moral stand is our best hope for surviving as the kind of people we believe ourselves to be.

Obama-Makes-Me-Crazy Syndrome

The President's persisting popularity is driving the Neo-Con elite into an alternate-universe frenzy, as reflected today in Charles Krauthammer's description of last week's White House trip:

"With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world."

This follows Karl Rove's assertion that "no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly. Mr. Obama has not come close to living up to his own standards. It took him less than 11 weeks to achieve the very opposite of what he promised."

These pronouncements are the latest emanations from the new Dick Cheney School of Logic, which holds that the President's refusal to torture is an invitation for another 9/11 attack.

Explaining such unhinged reasoning would normally be the province of Krauthammer, whose career arc has taken him from the practice of psychiatry to politics in the Carter Administration to Pulitzer-Prize punditry.

But it's doubtful that he will enlighten us on how the loony bin cliché of patients thinking they're Napoleon has morphed into depressed Neo-Cons thinking that Barack Obama is Osama bin Laden.

The 21st-century version of Elba is a crazy-making place.

How Low Can Cheney Go?

When he left office, the former Vice President's approval rating was 13 percent. Yet in the past week, Dick Cheney has managed to make it worse.

By criticizing President Obama for refusing to torture, Cheney has outdone himself to the point that even Republican Congressmen are now calling on him to shut up.

“He became so unpopular while he was in the White House," says Congressman John Duncan, "that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public.”

That motion is seconded by fellow Tennessee House member Zach Wamp: “Interpret it however you want to, but what I’m saying is: We should focus on the people that will lead us tomorrow, not the people who led us yesterday. With all due respect to former Vice President Cheney, he represents what’s behind us, not what’s ahead of us.”

As politely as possible, Republicans are suggesting that Cheney find other ways to occupy himself.

"Tending a legacy is best done in a memoir,” says Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk, who hopes to run for Obama's former Senate seat next year. “I would just encourage everybody who has left office to follow the tradition of the Founding Fathers--to write your memoirs."

How many ways can the GOP find to tell Cheney to get lost?

Chiding Cheney

This White House isn't going to be dumbstruck by Republican media attacks. Asked about the former VP's CNN performance yesterday, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters today, “I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal.”

Gibbs was responding to Cheney's charge that President Obama is making choices that "raise the risk to the American people of another attack" like 9/11.

Asked whether he wasn't being a little rough on a former Vice President, Gibbs didn't back down.

"I hope," he said, "my sarcasm didn’t mask the seriousness of my answer. For seven-plus years, the very perpetrators that the vice president says he’s concerned about weren’t brought to justice.”

Gibbs may not be as easy on the eyes as Dana Perino, but he's a lot feistier.

Vintage Cheney: Sour and Poisonous

Torture, the former Vice President tell us today, is "absolutely essential" to preventing future 9/11s and that "President Obama campaigned against it all across the country, and now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack."

If Dick Cheney's goal is to make George W. Bush look like a statesman, his CNN interview today is a good start. "Cheap shot" is too mild a description for a former Vice President casually calling a sitting president too naïve to head off terrorist attacks with no chance of ever being held to account for saying it.

But being unaccountable is Cheney's hallmark. As the most secretive Vice President in history, he shrugged off all demands for transparency and now, instead of remaining in his accustomed silence, emerges to defend the alternate reality he helped create for eight years.

In Iraq, Cheney says, "We've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do."

The economy? "Stuff happens, and an administration has to be able to respond to that and we did," he tells John King.

It's unclear whether or not George W. Bush has the least sense of shame over what he did to the country, but it's clear that Dick Cheney doesn't and that he doesn't intend to stop doing it.

The Unspeakable Cheney Speaks Up

The self-selected, unelected Vice President of 2000 is still intent on earning his title as worst ever. Only two weeks after being wheeled out of office, he has these gracious words about the new administration:

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry.”

In an interview, Dick Cheney tells Politico that protecting the country is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” adding “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did--with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth--then we would have been attacked again. Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

And Cheney knows this how? Apparently by consulting the same home-cooked intelligence that told him Saddam Hussein had links to the 9/11 terrorists and was working on nuclear weapons to use against us.

His advice to the new president: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

After leaving an economy in tatters, the former VP has no apologies, only a head-shaking comment: “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The combination of the financial crisis that started last year, coupled now with, obviously, a major recession, I think we’re a long way from having solved these problems.”

We? The recession is apparently an act of nature that couldn't have been foreseen or prevented. By the logic of Cheneyworld, that's Obama's problem to solve. After winning the war on terror, you couldn't expect the Bush Administration to do everything.

Cheneyworld: Robot Gone Wild

Watching the VP interview by Jim Lehrer on PBS last night recalled the movie "Westworld" about a theme park in which lifelike robots run amok and start killing. It came out at the time that an automaton named Dick Cheney, codenamed Backseat by the Secret Service, was serving in the White House, getting toilet leaks fixed and installing a headrest for Betty Ford on the presidential helicopter.

More than three decades later, asked whether 4500 American and more than a hundred thousand Iraqi deaths were "worth" what happened there, the now glorified robot answers, "I think so...Because I believed at the time that what Saddam Hussein represented was, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, was a terror-sponsoring state--so designated by the State Department. He was making payments to the families of suicide bombers; he provided a safe haven and sanctuary for Abu Nidal and other terrorist operations. He had produced and used weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological agents.

"He'd had a nuclear program in the past. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and he did have a relationship with al-Qaida...That's not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11; it is to say, as George Tenet, CIA director testified in open session in the Senate, that there was a relationship there that went back 10 years."

In Cheneyworld, ask a question and the pre-recorded tape spools out the automatic answer. In that hermetically sealed space, the response about mistakes in Iraq, illegal torture, the economic meltdown, whatever is same robotic "I don't buy that."

In his insightful book, "Rise of the Vulcans," James Mann reported that "Cheney's ascent in the Ford White House served as an illustration of how an individual can rise to the top by virtue of his willingness to take care of the mundane chores that persons with larger egos avoid, thereby establishing reliability and learning all the inner workings of an organization.

"Cheney was akin to the clerk who becomes chief executive, the copy editor who rises to become editor in chief, the accountant who takes over the film studio."

But just as the Yul Brenner gunslinger robot in Westworld turned murderous without blinking an eye, we now have the 2009 model Cheney, with real blood on his hands after an eight-year rampage, still spouting the programmed answers to what he was doing all that time.

Lowballing Bush Memoirs

Laura Bush was on Fox News yesterday, probably the last in a round of appearances to drum up interest in her memoirs.

For some reason, publishers have not been bidding up any proposals for Bush nostalgia, even those of the relatively popular First Lady.

"One question that seems to be weighing on prospective editors," the New Yorker reports, "is whether a book by Mrs. Bush will provide a candid account of her feelings, and perhaps counter the popular view of her as an opinion-free robot."

Candid? What world are these publishing people living in? White House memoirs deal in self-justification, rewriting history and sometimes revenge (pace Nancy Reagan), but candor is never on the menu.

If it were, what we would most want to hear from Laura Bush is not about the White House years, but how she married a middle-aged drunk and straightened him out, a creditable feat for a spouse but a disaster for the country.

But the chances of learning that from her are about the same as getting a primal scream from Hillary Clinton over living with a skirt-chasing jerk before and after moving to Washington.

As a one-time book publisher, I was an unsuccessful bidder for Lady Bird Johnson's "A White House Diary," one of the few successful examples of the genre. (LBJ himself was too depressed to finish his own memoirs. As he told Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was collaborating with him, "They'll get me anyhow, no matter how hard I try. No matter what I say in this book the critics will pull it apart. The reviews are in the hands of my enemies--the New York Times and the Eastern magazines--so I don't have a chance.")

Somewhere in the future, the outgoing President will no doubt pocket umpteen millions from his publicist Rupert Murdoch for a work of fiction about the Bush years. But the book I would really like to read is Dick Cheney's "Dear Reader: As I Was Saying to Pat Leahy..."

Dick Cheney's Farewell Snarls

Bush's Scrooge is making some final appearances and, true to his nature, giving us "Bah, humbug" to the very end.

Almost six years, 4210 American lives and trillions of dollars after the Iraq invasion, the Vice President tells us "the world is better off with Saddam gone...This was a bad actor."

Torture? "Did it produce the desired results? I think it did...it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves."

William Kristol, in his fond farewell, assures Cheney "Popularity Isn't Everything" as a new poll shows 23 percent of Americans ranking him as the worst vice president ever. But the VP, who picked himself for the job, doesn't require solace. "I'm very comfortable," he says. "with where we are and what we achieved substantively. And frankly, I would not want to be one of those guys who spends all his time reading the polls."

Kristol's compatriots on the New York Times editorial page have a slightly different view, pointing out that "it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews."

Not for someone who personifies the old saying, "often wrong but never in doubt." Asked about "second thoughts" over publicly telling Sen. Pat Leahy to copulate with himself, Cheney says, "No, I thought he merited it at the time."

Judging from his curtain calls this week, Dick Cheney has felt that way about the rest of us for eight years.

Debriefing Bush

"I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." That, in a nutshell, is George W. Bush's valedictory thought about invading Iraq, in interviews with Charlie Gibson on ABC this week.

"A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is [sic] a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush added.

But the historical record shows that the "lot of people" consisted mainly of Dick Cheney and his henchman, relying on a swindling Ahmad Chalabi and torturing CIA intelligence into a false case against the Iraqi regime he was salivating to replace.

"We've really got to make the case" against Hussein, Bush told Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, "and I want you to make it" at the UN.

A few days later, according to the Washington Post, Powell was "taken aback" by "a 48-page, single-spaced compilation of Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program, replete with drama, rhetorical devices and a kitchen sink full of allegations. The most extreme version of every charge the administration had made about Hussein, the document had been written, Powell concluded, under the tutelage of Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, who shared all of his boss's hard-line views and then some."

In blaming faulty intelligence for a misbegotten war, Bush is exposing himself to history's choice of branding him either a fool or a lethal liar.

He would have done much better by looking back to George Washington's farewell words as he left the presidency:

"The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

Colin Powell's Revenge

As political observers parse The Endorsement, the unspoken element is the payback of Colin Powell, no matter how much he denies it, for the humiliation he suffered at the hands of Dick Cheney's gang in being forced to act as UN point man in justifying the invasion of Iraq with cooked intelligence.

Yes, Powell gives Obama credibility as commander-in-chief and a leader who will be able to reach across party lines. No, contrary to Rush Limbaugh et al, the endorsement is not racially based.

But behind Powell's calm, rational demeanor in explaining his decision on Meet the Press yesterday, he would be less than human if his own treatment by the Bush Administration was not involved in his thinking and, more to the point, feeling.

Before Iraq, Powell was the one of the most admired men in America, who might have been nominated for President in 1996 if he agreed to run. Today he is remembered for that February 2003 speech that misled Americans into believing Saddam Hussein had WMDs.

Before making the speech, Powell had spent a week wrestling with the White House staff, discarding what Dick Cheney had called Scooter Libby’s stuff and other “garbage” from the likes of Ahmed Chalabi.

Earlier Cheney had made it clear he and Bush were using Powell’s credibility to sell the war. Poking him in the chest, the Vice President told Powell, "You've got high poll ratings, you can afford to lose a few points."

In the end, Powell made the speech and lost much more--his reputation as a man of honor after a lifetime of public service.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, Powell has put it on the table after five years for those he called the GOP "crazies" to eat at just the right time.