Bush & Company

IN MY TIME
A Personal and Political Memoir
Dick Cheney (with Liz Cheney)
Simon & Schuster (Threshold Editions)
527 pages of text

The author is living up to his reputation full force. The imperious, boastful, hawkish and now disloyal vice president is back.

His book's often humanizing and touching personal photographs cause one to wonder how this family man and doting grandpa of seven adorable grandchildren could be so oblivious to the blunt termination of so many other adorable grandchildren and their grandpas---besides Americans and allies, countless Iraquis and Afghanistanis have been slaughtered---as a consequence of his obdurate and merciless policies.

Even as his own party, his colleagues and closest associates are loudly complaining that his written words are words of betrayal, he continues to see himself as a solitary leader in the company of cowards.

George W. Bush's vice president makes no apologies, not for pushing the president into invading Iraq, not to Scooter Libby, not to Valerie Plame, not to Colin Powell or Condi Rice for what he wrote in his memoir or his patronizing of George W. Bush, who finally resisted his mentor's most extreme hawkishness, nor for the needlessly torchered and the dead. Nor does he apologize in his book. His single regret appears to be not pushing harder for the bombing of Syria's reactor in 2007. He discouraged the White House's impulse to apologize for the infamous "sixteen words."
"The sixteen words were true," he insists. Of remaining firm on his position of attacking Iraq, David Letterman quipped, "He would still invade the wrong country."

Unwilling to credit the current administration for the sensational conclusion to the search for Osama, he states, "I was gratified that after years of diligent and dedicated work, our nation's intelligence community and our special operations forces were able. . . to find and kill bin Laden." This, despite his president's televised statement that he wasn't really concerned anymore about the master planner of 9/11.

All in all, Dick Cheney is proud of his record as vice president and seems rhapsodic over the prospect of his book's impact. "There are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington," he brags.

As his mentor, he made the president the fall guy for decisions he, the so-called "eminence grise," actually made, although Mr. Cheney probably doesn't see it that way.

It's a bipartisan failure that this all-powerful former vice president is not to be tried and imprisoned for his major role in the Iraq invasion, the use of torture (which he paraphrases "tough interrogation") or spying on America's emails and phone calls and will bear no official stigma, rather be treated as a celebrity and former statesman, the author of an impressive volume depicting a weighty slice of American history. Poetic justice may determine how he's regarded.