My goodness, it looks like a little crockery is starting to get flung around the genteel confines of the cafe. It's about time that this book club turned into a fight club.

Bart defends himself from Paul Mirengoff's contention that he created a "Potemkin Washington", DC by pointing to his book as trying to achieve an objective look at Cheney with a kind of Thucydidean detachment. For the most part, I'm sympathetic to Bart, and it is, of course, the traditional aspiration of American journalists to "show, don't tell," as the old saying has it.

But Mirengoff is surely on to something when he says that the marshaling of evidence, the structure of the book itself is, to some extent, going to shape the narrative. I don't see anything wrong with that. Otherwise, Bart would end up in a soup of relativism, wouldn't he? The testimony he elicits from, for example, Dick Armey (not exactly a darling of the Washing Post) portrays Cheney in a very dim light--as willing, for the purposes of selling the Iraq War, to deceive an old chum. Goodness knows, Cheney isn't the first high official to engage in such tactics: Gordon M. Goldstein's new book, Lessons In Disaster, notes that McGeorge Bundy flummoxed Lyndon B. Johnson by suggesting that he should simply tell the American public the truth about sending more troops to Vietnam. Bundy observed, "Lyndon Johnson's view of the truth is like a Boston trustee's view of capital. It's much too valuable ever to be used."

What's more, Mirengoff is right about the nature of the government bureaucracy, though I think he does the CIA a disservice by imputing highly politicized behavior to it. Instead, the bureaucracy tends to be filled with timid time-servers who drag their feet on implementing any policies. Cheney wanted to put the bureaucrats on notice. But the dilettantes--and can there be any other word?--that he enabled turned out to be completely incompetent in preparing for the Iraq War. Now Donald Rumsfeld and the neocon claque that surrounded him at the Defense Department is on the outside, while Cheney remains a lonely survivor, embedded in an administration that refuses to follow his counsel about taking a harder line, even war, against Iran and North Korea.

Perhaps Cheney will be hailed as a savior in the future. But I rather doubt it. The truth is that it's precisely Cheney's constant attempts to do an end-run around Congress, to shield the president and himself from any and all scrutiny that has engendered the intense interest in him. The irony may be that had Cheney been more forthright, he might have been more successful. But as Josh Marshall showed several years ago in the Washington Monthly, Cheney's record as a business executive was an abysmal one. His tenure as vice-president has been no less woeful.