The Man Behind the Curtain

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," said the Wizard of Oz in the 1939 movie by the same name. For the entire Bush presidency, the man behind the curtain has been that éminence grise and walking rollodex,Vice President Richard Cheney. He reminds me of the consiglieri Tom Hagen in the Godfather movies, both chilling and effective, the consummate fixer and occasional kneecaper:

Sal as he is about to be executed for treason against the family: "Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old times' sake?" Tom: "Can't do it Sally"

Cheney seemed to ooze competence and gravitis, bringing dimension and heft to Bush's light-weight qualifications. He represented Wyoming in the House of Representatives for six terms, served the first George Bush as defense secretary, and ascended the pinnacle in the private sector as chairman and CEO of the multinational construction company Halliburton where he earned $2. 2 million and held another $10 million in stock options. Thus, given his qualifications, it does puzzle me that the Bush administration under his steadfast counsel is now a train-wreck, from the Scooter Libby conviction, to the Hurricane Katrina and Veteran hospital scandels, to most notably the idiotic assumptions that brought about what may very well be the most catastropic foreign affairs failure in the last hundred years, a failure that could bring the Republican Party to its knees in 2008.

It may very well have been that Cheney's so-called competence was an illusion, much like that of the Wizard of Oz. Perhaps a kind of psychosis emerged out of that macabre group hug of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice to create serial failure. In some areas, the Bush administration has done well, such as in relations to the People's Republic of China and in the growth of employment. But all of that is overshadowed by the miscalculations that led us into war by the one man with the international expertise to have known better, Richard ("Dick") Cheney.

Bush's Consiglieri Stumbles