Bart shows that Cheney had little interest in "cultural" issues.

On the other side, we have his marriage to Lynne Cheney, and all the time he spent at the American Enterprise Institute:

Something subtly changed in Dick Cheney between 1995 and 2000, some equilibrium or inward balance of ambition and ordinary prudence. These were his years as CEO of Halliburton, where he did not post enormous profits...

These were the years, too, of Dick Cheney's close association with the American Enterprise Institute and its offspring, the Project for the New American Century. The parent think tank, once an ordinary home for postwar business conservatism, had mutated, under the guidance of Irving Kristol, into the most lavish and energetic of the quasi-academic lobbies of neoconservative doctrine. The AEI, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, had been transformed into an institute for the promotion of laissez-faire economics, militarized foreign policy, and the dismantling of the welfare state...

How did they get so close to Dick Cheney? The answer lies in the fact that Cheney has an inquisitive mind, but from the accidents of his career and placement, he was for a long time a thinker deprived of intellectual society. Neoconservatism, as it developed in the 1980s, came to have its own heroes (Robert Bork), its canon of revered texts (Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind), and a set of prejudices delivered in a reasonable tone: hostile to individual liberty, appreciative of modern technology, friendly to religion as a guide to morals and an engine of state power. It was, to repeat, a substitute culture of satisfying density. The AEI along with journals like Commentary and, more recently, The Weekly Standard offer, for those who take the full course, a total environment, an idiom of managerial-intellectual judgment that blends the rapidity of journalism with the weightier pretensions of an academy.

...The self-confidence of this substitute culture fortified Cheney's sense that he had always already heard the relevant views, and that he had come into contact with the best minds...

"One would expect any Republican administration to take serious exception to at least a few aspects of the liberal Democratic agenda of the 1970s."

Especially since Republicans find adherence to the rule of law abhorrent, at least when they are not dismissing it as "quaint," or relying on hypertechnical interpretations of it to demagogue Democrats.

The fact that your posts are outnumbering even the book's author's here indicate that you have internalized one of the chief lessons of the effective propagandist: get the spin out htere early and often, and the truth will eventually be totally obscured.

Perhaps a look back at Cheney's 1980 years as a member of the House is in order here.

He opposed a ban on selling armor piercing bullets. He opposed sanctions on South Africa because it was practicing appartheid. He voted against ERA. He voted against extending the Clean Water Act. He voted against a ban on guns that can escape detection. He voted to ban Head Start.

Wrap it all up and Cheney the Vice President is and always has been Cheney the man.

always fun to hear the voices of the left which seem to be as usual simple assertions with very little basis in objective fact.IF I were to respond in a similar vein, e. g.,Obama is an empty suit who thinks we have 58 states,a fascist who will destroy anyone who dares question him, or smear left wing politicians the way writers here smear and denounced anyone who disagrees with them you would have fits. Well,enjoy them, but why not an attempt at civilized discourse?The AEI revived free market views,the case for a strong defense,and cataloged the facts of the destruction caused to the poor by the Great Society programs.You are so biased on this site you cannot offer a reasoned arguement on anything you are all so blinded by hate.Step back and read the comments on this site.Its not a picture of thoughtful analysis.