Still more on the world of Dick Cheney from Maureen Dowd

As we noted the other day when he replaced Scooter Libby it was a case of Cheney to Fitzgeral....F*ck You. Well it appears he has flipped off a few Republicans in the process. Maureen Dowd tells us today that Cheney has replaced Cheney's Cheney with Cheney's Cheney's Cheney. (Available at Truthout)

Once Scooter left, many people, including a lot of alarmed conservatives and moderate Republicans, were hoping that W. and Vice would throw open some White House windows to let the air and sun in, and climb out of that incestuous, secretive, vindictive, hallucinatory dark hole they've been bunkered in for five years.

But they like it in their paranoid paradise. One of the most confounding aspects of W.'s exceedingly confounding presidency is his apparent unwillingness to consider that anyone who ever worked for him - and was in any way responsible for any of the disasters now afflicting his administration - should be jettisoned.

This is not loyalty. This is myopia. Where is a meddling, power-intoxicated first lady when we need one? Maybe the clever Nancy Reagan should have a little talk with Laura Bush tonight at the dinner for Prince Charles and Camilla, and explain to her how to step in and fire overweening officials who are hurting your man.

That's a point I have made before, Nancy Reagan was wise enough to convince the failing Ronnie that he should jettison the neocon nut cases that got him into the Iran Contra mess. I doubt that Laura is up to that task unfortunately for the world.

Cheney's Cheney's Cheney

Dick Cheney has appointed David Addington as his new chief of staff, an ideologue who is so fanatically secretive, so in love with the shadows, so belligerent and unyielding that he's known around town as the Keyser Soze of the usual suspects. At 48, Mr. Addington is a legend: he's worked his way up the G.O.P. scandal ladder from Iran-contra to Abu Ghraib.

The man who would be a king maker.

Mr. Addington has done his best to crown King Cheney. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Mr. Addington pushed an obscure philosophy called the unitary executive theory that "favors an extraordinarily powerful president." He would go "through every page of the federal budget in search of riders that could restrict executive authority."

The other half of the dynamic duo that replaced Scooter is John Hannah, a man involved in the Plame outing and thought by many to still be in jeopardy himself. If that's not flipping Fitzgerald the bird I don't know what is.



Maureen Dowd