His name is Dick Cheney

Too many people are whingeing about the excellent Washington Post series on Dick Cheney. It is hitting depths about Cheney's intricate web of influence in ways that have not been seen. People are whining that this is too late, you useless press. Six and half years and now you tell us this.

People, have you not read the story? This man operates in a realm of executive secrecy that plums the depths of hell. Cheney has been behind literally every repellent, destructive and, yes, stupid policy to date (unless, of course, his Secret/SCI desire is to actually sink this country). And he does all this without many people even knowing it.

And he was doing other things too:

Cheney led a group that winnowed the president's list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Cheney resolved a crisis in the space program after the Columbia shuttle disaster. Cheney fashioned a controversial truce between the legislative and executive branches -- and averted resignations at the top of the Justice Department and the FBI -- over the right of law enforcement authorities to investigate political corruption in Congress.

Busy guy.

I love this description of Cheney's machinations by David Frum:

A lot of it was a black box, and I think designedly so. It was like -- you know that experiment where you pass a magnet under the table and you see the iron filings on the top of the table move? You know there's a magnet there because of what you see happening, but you never see the magnet.

Part Three is out and it's a barn burner: Cheney designed the $674 billion tax cut in 2003 and cast the deciding vote in the Senate on his own policy, including a capital gains cut that Bush had refused. I now have to reexamine Cheney's claim that he is part of the executive and the legislature.

Cheney's affinity for supply-side (yes, there it is) economics, of course, has driven the country onto a path of fiscal ruin. He did think about it a lot, though, using a "panel of outside experts" and "meticulous preparation" to raise the deficit to the point where the debt ceiling would have to rise several times during the Bush years. Democrats grimace now as they are faced with having to also raise the debt ceiling to above $9 trillion, something they swore they would not do. And Dick Cheney did that.

There is a reason it would take this long for such a story to come out. His name is Dick Cheney.