The Truth About Cheney

"Vice President Cheney's wild and wacky misadventures with the truth continue, much to the consternation of everyone who values transparency and accountability in government. What will it take for him to come clean?
Remember during the 2000 campaign when the idea of Dick Cheney as George W. Bush's running mate was a comforting thought? Bush's glaringly thin professional resume was somehow easier to overlook because his running mate had a proven track record of operating in the nation's capital.
Three years later, it's obvious that Cheney is the very embodiment of "typical" Washington behavior that Bush so often claims to despise. The vice president is the ultimate insider, with the survival skills of a Navy SEAL (which, perhaps, could have been another career calling for Cheney, were it not for those student deferments he used during Vietnam). Ironically, Cheney's behavior would make an easy target for the president in one of his anti-Washington campaign speeches as an example of all that's wrong with traditional government-types. Let's see what he's done.
Help the people who help you.
This type of political backscratching can manifest itself in a number of ways. It could take the form of a private hunting trip with a Supreme Court justice while a case regarding the Energy Task Force is still pending, for example. Or, it could be huge corporate tax breaks to benefit campaign donors. Or, it could be a giant no-bid government contract to Halliburton to supply troops over in Iraq. Sadly, none of these examples is even remotely hypothetical.
What's even more galling about this behavior is that Cheney and others made only the laziest attempts to cover their tracks. (Remember Justice Antonin Scalia's defense of his impartiality, followed by a snide, "Quack, quack"?)
Cheney attempted to shrug off the Halliburton war contracts as mere coincidences, in no way connected to his tenure as CEO. Last September, he appeared on "Meet the Press," and tried to put the ongoing controversy to bed by stating, "As vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
Leading conservatives were quick to defend the vice president – and label all those who didn't believe his riff as heartless cynics. In a piece entitled "Cynics Without a Cause," published in The New York Times last November, David Brooks concluded, "The lesson of this Halliburton business is that some parts of our government really do make their decisions on the merits."
Actually, the lesson is this: In the Bush administration, where there's smoke, there's fire."