How do you rate Cheney's presidency?
What is apparent from the excerpts of Bob Woodward's upcoming book is that America not only does not have a president it voted for, it has a president that was not even running for the 2000 presidential election.
Up until now it has been a running joke that Cheney is really the President, but in the last month - Cheney and Bush testifying together, Bush's incoherent press conference, and now Woodward's book - it has become frighteningly clear who is in charge.
The Facts:
- : Cheney chooses Cheney as President.
- : President Cheney heads the energy task force and runs other economic policies. In November of that year, President Cheney tells Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill: "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter."
- : August, President Cheney took the administration's Iraq policy on a harder track in a speech declaring the weapons inspections ineffective. Cheney's speech was viewed as the beginning of a campaign to undermine or overthrow Saddam. Woodward said Bush let Cheney make the speech without asking what he would say.
- : March, President Cheney declares war. "The vice president also figured prominently in a protracted decision March 19, 2003, to strike Iraq before a 48-hour ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to leave the country had expired. But Bush did not make his decision until he had cleared everyone out of the Oval Office except the vice president. ``I think we ought to go for it,'' Cheney is quoted as saying. Bush did."
- : April, President Cheney will not allow Bush to talk with 9-11 panel by himself.
(Is President Cheney afraid that Bush will break down and tell the commission he has been kidnapped by President Cheney for the past four years?