I replied to Paul's first post before reading the most recent. So a few more words on the "Potemkin Washington" that Paul sees in my book.

Paul says that in Angler-world "the only pairs of sharp elbows appear to belong to the vice president and his counsel," while "everyone else plays 'fair,' never seeking an edge for the purpose of advancing an agenda." He recalls no one in the book, Cheney's office aside, "playing 'hardball' until somewhere around page 300." That is not quite accurate, though I concede that Paul has a point. In fact, Angler depicts quite a few rivals who try to block Cheney's path, using many of the same time-honored techniques. One example: John Bellinger, Gordon England, Phil Zelikow and Condi Rice team up to try to close down Guantanamo, with Rice giving a memo privately to Bush and then sneaking it onto a Principals Committee agenda. Also in Angler, Matt Waxman and other allies maneuver to restore Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention as Pentagon policy, attempting a fait accompli reversal of Cheney's success in making legal room for "cruelty" in interrogations. Christie Whitman seeks a one-on-one meeting with Bush to argue against Cheney's proposal to drop a campaign pledge about carbon dioxide regulation. Alan Greenspan works with Congress and White House friends to warn against a second round of tax cuts. Senators Specter and Chafee try to use the five votes of their "Mod Squad" caucus as a pivot point in a closely divided Senate, aiming to water down Cheney's hard-line initiatives.

Paul is right to say, on the other hand, that most of my stories of maneuvering involve the vice president. That reflects, perhaps, some distortion in the self-defining prism of a book on Cheney. But I think I do a decent job of mirroring Cheney's win-loss record. In all the examples I mention above, the vice president's opponents wind up flat on their backs. (For instance, Cheney and Rumsfeld removed the Gitmo memo from the Principals Committee agenda, once and for all, within a few hours of Rice's initial gambit.) I don't think it's "inconceivable" at all that intelligence analysts would shade their assessments to shape policy choices, any more than I doubt that policy makers sometimes do the converse. But I found no evidence of that kind of thing in the case Paul cites about Iran, and I'm not aware that anyone else has found it either. I'm an empirical guy, and I'll be the first to say so if Mike McConnell or Mike Hayden, the directors, respectively, of national intelligence and of the CIA, turn out to have cherry-picked the files to avert a confrontation with Iran. For now they seem unlikely players for that role. Both are Cheney proteges from Pentagon days and, unlike their fellow protege Colin Powell, have taken care not to place themselves athwart the vice president.

I am not sure, in the end, how to respond effectively to Paul's critique. It is, in a way, immune to evidence. Paul acknowledges that I do not actually "assert the existence of the 'Potemkin Washington' I've just described," preferring instead to use subtler techniques to paint the vice president as a villain. In this Paul is aligned with David, whose Slate review positioned my "praise for Cheney's strengths" as "a backhanded form of damnation," proving all the more effectively that "Cheney's role in shaping Bush's presidency ... has been overwhelmingly malign." Anything positive I say about Cheney, by these accounts, is mere proof of my prosecutorial skill. That's why I say Angler is a Rorschach test. Feelings run strong about Cheney, and the public debate is sufficiently partisan that there are very few places these days to find an extended exchange among thinkers as diverse as Paul, David, Spencer, Jake and Steve. I describe what Cheney did, and how he did it. Readers have strong reactions, pro and con. In a subsequent post I'll describe my own assessment, which comes mainly in the final chapter of the book.