Newsflash: Word is that Bart Gellmann will soon be emerging from a hidden location to respond to these posts. But before he does, I'm going to offer a few thoughts on Dick Cheney's mental world. If you'll recall, in Saul Bellow's novel Mr. Sammler's Planet, 1960s New York is lurching out of control. The liberals have taken over. The universities are hotbeds of revolt. A black pick-pocket ends up flashing his member at a cowering Mr. Sammler, who managed to evade the Nazis while hiding out in Poland but now, decades later, as a withered old man, can't escape the social chaos created by the latest breakdown of the liberal order. While I wouldn't credit Cheney with the kind of literary perspicuity with which Bellow endows Sammler, I suspect that Cheney, no less, is a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s--someone who despises what he saw as the rise of the counterculture and set out to battle it.

Having experienced Watergate and the Church committee, which Cheney believed represented a vital threat to the powers of the presidency, Cheney spent the rest of his career out to engage in a kind of rollback of liberal, congressional reforms. His marriage to Lynne Cheney, which should be explored further, may well have hardened his views as she is very much a neocon culture warrior. Spencer Ackerman, however, suggests that "if Cheney's views boil down to anything, I'd contend, it's that power for its own sake is an uncomplicated good, and letting it expire without use is irresponsible." This strikes me as a necessary but insufficient explanation of Cheney's motives and goals. Doesn't this make it seem as though Cheney accumulated power out of a principled respect for the office of the presidency rather than to advance specific policies that were near and dear to him?

Take the Iraq War. Spencer cogently notes that the institutional constraints on war no were eroded by September 11. But Cheney wasn't backing the war simply to expand the powers of the presidency or to show that the U.S. could take out foes whenever and wherever it chose. He also may well have seen it as settling an old score, taking out a tyrant who had eluded his grasp in 1991. Hence the drafting of the Defense Policy Guidance, issued, or, rather, leaked, to much tumult, in 1992. As David Bromwich observes in the November 20 New York Review of Books, "Defense Policy Guidance conferred on America the right to launch at will an international war of aggression." Not defense. Aggression.

The biggest problem with Cheney, it seems to me, is that he created his own context--he turned the vice-presidency into an unsupervised, separate entity that didn't simply flout but actively spurned the notion that it was subject to any constitutional oversight. You know, the whole vice-president's mansion doesn't appear on Google thing, the secret bunkers, the refusal to release the names of his aides, and so on. Indeed, Gellman's account suggests that Cheney appears to have believed, and continue to believe, that the vice-presidency is even less subject to scrutiny than the presidency itself! Professor Bromwich aptly calls it an imperium in imperio, a government within a government. I call it Mr. Cheney's planet, and the sooner we are rid of it and him, the better.