For those of you who have never read Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" nor have seen the marvelous film version directed by David Lean, I will attempt a very brief description of this character. Miss Haversham is central to the story's triple themes of love, loss, and redemption. As a young girl she was literally left standing at the altar, jilted by her husband-to-be. From that day on she walled herself up inside her enormous house, closed the windows tight, drew the heavy velvet drapes lest one single ray of sunshine enter her now dark world, and left everything that had been prepared for the wedding feast in place.
When we first meet her in the story, she is now an old woman who has spent her life consumed with hatred for men and concerned only with exacting revenge on the lot of them. She sits every day in near total darkness, clothed in the wedding gown she donned with such great expectations decades before, and plots and plans on ways to achieve her now sole purpose in life. She is a tragic figure deeply wounded emotionally and psychologically crippled by her obsession. The remnants of the past are her only companions and her need to justify her existence her only motivation.
Dick Cheney is in many ways like Miss Haversham for he too has suffered a terrible loss: the loss of power which he loved so dearly and the abandonment by those whom he believed wanted and needed him for the rest of their lives. I think Cheney truly believes that had the Republicans kept control of the government, he would have been called upon to continue his role as the eminence grise to the new Republican administration; the Cardinal Richelieu to President McCain and his Republican successors. But that dream was crushed by the overwhelming rejection of him and his policies by the American people last November.
He sees these people as ingrates who, with the flip of a switch, discarded the man who had kept them safe for seven long years. He is angry. He is bitter. And now as he sits in the darkness of political exile and he plots and plans to redress those wrongs and to forge an eternal image of himself as the Great Protector of America. He believes beyond the shadow of a doubt that every action he took and every order he issued were licit, legal, and within his powers as he self-defined them. His de facto usurpation of the powers of the presidency was justified in the defense of the nation. No act of torture, no illegal imprisonment of suspected terrorists, no unjustified war of aggression or any other action was unjustifiable in his role as savior of the free world.
Cheney believes that he and he alone can save America from destruction by its enemies within and its enemies without... enemies of his own creation and imagining. He has armed himself with the sword of righteous indignation and has set out on a new crusade, a brand new war of aggression to reclaim his rightful place both in the continued defense of the country and as one of the nation's greatest heroes. And just like his first war of aggression, it will be without end.