Bart's book is one of the best to be written about the Bush administration, at least until the National Archives allows the scholars of the future full access to the classified record. Actually, chances are Liz Cheney's children will still be litigating the case for continued secrecy, represented by little Addingtons, so perhaps Angler will simply stand as among the greatest accounts ever to be written of these last eight years. There are worse fates.

But here's where I'd like to press Bart and the rest of our group: what's the heart of the Cheney legacy?

In large part my question builds off of Jake's post. Jake asks, in so many words, whether Cheney's liberal critics would really have such a problem if Cheneyesque powers were put to liberal ends. Given that the last president to utilize executive power in such an unrestrained and unprecedented fashion is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the question is more than fair.

But 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. A couple years ago I co-wrote a profile of Cheney that contended that there was no Bush 41 or Bush 43 version of Cheney -- there was only ever different circumstances that constrained or liberated Cheney to put his instincts into practice. (Given that both Bart and court stenographer Steve Hayes generally agree, I think the contention has held up.) In retrospect, I wish we had gone further in developing a grand unified theory of Cheney. We reported too much that Cheney was a sort of early neoconservative, eager to utilize American power to promote a more democratic world out of a conviction that such a thing was necessary for U.S. national security. Since the piece was published -- and thanks to books like Angler -- I've come to believe we misread our evidence. Cheney will simply search for whatever rationale he can find for the usage of executive power. That's how he can, for instance, harmonize his early-90s-to-2000 opposition to invading Iraq with his late-2001-and-onward fervor for precisely such a thing.

It's admittedly an easier explanation to say that Cheney's views on Iraq changed with 9/11. But it doesn't -- and didn't -- for a moment follow that concerns about an indefinite occupation of an Arab country dissipate with the changed calculation of risk after the Twin Towers fell. What actually changed is the disappearance of counterweights -- institutional impediments to such an action. During and after the Gulf War, the constellation of institutional obstacles to invading Iraq -- the United Nations, the Democratic opposition, the country's touch-and-go wariness to a ground war -- were such that to propose such a thing would have weakened the presidency. It's easy to forget that in 1991 the Gulf War was a controversial decision, and to expand its goals was to guarantee overwhelming political backlash. In 2001, none of these impediments existed to remotely the same degree, and to propose not invading Iraq was, in a real sense, to constrain the presidency.

This isn't to say that Cheney secretly wanted to invade Iraq in 1991 and, like a Scooby-Doo villain, would have gotten away with it if not for all those meddling kids. It's to say that Cheney doesn't sweat the details about the exercise of power -- not that he's indifferent to those details, which he manifestly isn't, but that those details are a second-order question when compared to the imperative of harnessing and using executive power. (He has Libby and Addington and Edelman and Hannah and Nuland and Kellems and Martin and Schmidt for the smaller stuff.) If there's one criticism I have with Bart's portrayal of Cheney, it's that he spends too much time carefully and methodically demonstrating how counterproductive Cheney's conception of executive power has been. I suspect that Cheney disagrees, and not for self-serving reasons. Chances are he thinks that one day Joe Biden will come around, and then his work will be done.

Also, later this week I want to take my revenge on little-known but obnoxious Cheney aide Kevin Kellems.