Cheney’s exit interview

In his final days, the vice president opens up

Dick Cheney is leaving office “in character,” said Mike Lupica in the New York Daily News. But as he reminded us on Fox News Sunday (watch excerpt), his character is “as weird and unhinged as Jack Nicholson’s in ‘A Few Good Men.’” Cheney has “tried to hijack the Constitution,” pushed us into a needless war with Iraq, and approved of torture—and he still says “he and George W. Bush were right about everything.” Maybe that’s why the Bush team has a 29 percent popularity rating.

Hey, “popularity isn’t everything,” said William Kristol in The New York Times. “Cheney isn’t, I’m afraid, always wise,” and sure, he’s “the nation’s most unpopular Republican,” but at least he (and, for that matter, our “most unpopular Democrat, Gov. Rod Blagojevich”) tell it like they see it. “No spin. No doubletalk.” Surely we can celebrate that.

It’s true, “he says what he thinks,” said Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic online, but what he thinks is truly frightening. On Fox, Cheney suggested that the president has the right to do basically anything—dissolve the Constitution, “commit war crimes,” singlehandedly “destroy all civilization” with nukes—with impunity. We should have impeached this “would-be dictator” long ago.

His detractors try to make him into a “silly caricature,” said Don Suber in the West Virginia Daily Mail online, but “Cheney has a job to do and he gets it done.” As the guy “riding shotgun in the Bush administration,” his job is to cover “the president’s back.” He does that well, and he’s not about to apologize for it.