David Ignatius, "It's all about Cheney"

I discussed Cenk Uygur's commentary below where he said what many of us have thought for a long time, Dick Cheney hates the United States and loves tyranny. He has spent all of his adult life, which began working for Richard Nixon, trying to undo the constitution of the United States and replacing it with a tyrannical presidency. While I doubt that was his intention that's exactly what David Ignatius made clear in his commentary Cheney's Enigmatic Influence. In essence what Ignatius says is that Cheney is "tired of suffering fools". Those fools my friends are the American people, you and me.

The thrust of Cheney's views -- in urging the president to ignore politics and maintain a tough course on Iraq -- surfaced in an interview he gave last weekend to Chris Wallace of Fox News. Wallace noted that Iraq was a big issue in the November elections and that exit polls showed only 17 percent of voters supported sending in more troops. What followed was this remarkable exchange:

Wallace: "By taking the policy you have, haven't you, Mr. Vice President, ignored the express will of the American people in the November election?"

The vice president: "Well, Chris, this president, and I don't think any president worth his salt, can afford to make decisions of this magnitude according to the polls. The polls change day by day."
Wallace: "This was an election, sir."

The vice president: "Polls change day by day, week by week."

Those remarks capture what Cheney's friends say is his crucial contribution to internal decisions -- a conviction that much of the political debate in Washington is just noise and should be ignored in favor of the country's long-term interests.

"Over the years, he got tired of suffering fools," says one longtime Cheney friend. "He thinks it's all BS." This contempt for Washington developed when Cheney was a top White House aide in the Ford administration during the cacophony that followed Watergate, this friend says, and it ripened when he made enough money as chief executive of Halliburton that he didn't have to care what people in Washington thought. The danger is that in encouraging Bush to ignore polls and even elections, Cheney has helped set up a confrontation between Congress and the executive branch that could undermine any hope of achieving a bipartisan approach on Iraq.

Read that "any president worth his salt" won't pay any attention to the people who elected(?) him.