The new Vanity Fair has what looks like a fascinating oral history of the Bush administration from insiders who are more chatty than I'd expected they would be. The angle that's getting the headline is how Bush's presidency basically ended after Katrina -- no surprise there -- but I think former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson's comments on Dick Cheney are a lot more revealing:
This is what many of us have suspected from Day One, isn't it?....that Cheney, who Bush picked to head his vice presidential "search" committee in 2000 after clinching the nomination that spring, rigged the process to get himself selected -- and then took great advantage of that relationship to pursue his agenda of militaristic geo-politics with a dallop of torture.
This is one of the great mysteries of the last nine years -- just how exactly did Cheney manipulate the process so that Bush selected him?
And why?