Uh oh. I waited too long to weigh back in, and now there's way too much to talk about. I'll address two points now and post again as soon as I can.

Jake asks what's so new about a big shot cutting corners and maneuvering for power. In principle, nothing. Senior advisers to presidents contend for turf and influence, and they don't always play nicely. There are official meetings and real meetings, the latter setting policy without nettlesome opponents in the room. Powerful people use back channels and proxies, preempting rivals. They reach down to subordinates to shape the options sent back up to the boss. They promote allies and dispose of obstacles. Cheney did not invent the Cheney Rules, as I described them tongue-in-cheek in the Washington Post's "Outlook" section recently; the rules go back to The Prince and doubtless earlier.

I don't actually make a claim in Angler that Cheney's use of tools like these is exactly new. Now that Jake puts the question, though, I'd argue that Cheney has used them to greater effect than anyone in postwar Washington. It's not only that he is exceptionally skillful. Several things have made him different in kind than other skillful students of power, among whom I'd count Jim Baker and Henry Kissinger. One is that great technocrats are most commonly pragmatists. Power brokers usually look for horses to trade and deals to cut. We don't see many operators who combine Cheney's bureaucratic genius with the zealotry for principle I described in my first post. Not many have had the freedom that comes from working for a big-picture boss who leaves the details to lieutenants. Even with a president like that, the operators are seldom unrivaled. Reagan was about as detail-averse as George W. Bush, but he had a troika of powerful advisers (Baker, Deaver, Meese), no one of whom had Cheney's autonomy and scope of influence. The only figures with any real power under Bush were Rumsfeld and Rove, the one a close friend and the other a specialist who devised a mutual division of labor with the vice president. Rove's nickname for Cheney was Management (as in, better check with Management first), and when they disagreed Rove got out of Cheney's way. I could go on. No White House subordinate of Cheney's influence, for instance, has held so high a rank before. The VP has his own anthem, like "Hail to the Chief," and is the only independently elected Constitutional officer save the president. It's not even accurate to say Cheney was Bush's subordinate. As he noted himself in one candid interview, the vice president can't be fired.

Jake also asks why Cheney, therefore, is "uniquely reprehensible." That's not my bag. I don't claim that Angler is, or could be, free of subjective judgments. But whether Cheney was Good or Bad is not what this book is about. Angler is a narrative. It uses previously undisclosed documents, and interviews with people who have not spoken before, to tell stories we did not know. People who like Joe Biden and his policies will doubtless overlook his procedural fouls, as Jake predicts. People who like Cheney and his policies, as Paul Mirengoff does, are likewise disinclined to criticize his methods.

Even so, it has surprised me how seldom Cheney's admirers have attacked the book. Not all of them accuse me, as Paul does here, of an anti-Cheney slant. In many ways Angler is a Rorschach test. People who approve of what Cheney stands for -- toughness on terror, supply side tax cuts, aversion to popularity-seeking pols -- read the book and say, good for the vice president. Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, who describes himself as a member of the "Dick Cheney Fan Club," wrote that he learned enough from the Angler newspaper series, nonetheless, to wonder whether Cheney's methods were self-defeating. I imagine a close reader could make a case that one passage or another in my book has an unflattering slant, but I don't think Paul can support a claim that the work as a whole is an "anti-Cheney 'brief.'" I defend the VP against unfriendly charges that turned out to be false, and I grant him his motives throughout. Paul quotes a line in which I say Cheney had "incomparably greater impact on American interests and society" than the "familiar terrorist threat" that 9/11 announced (page 132). In fact, I specified that the familiar threat had emerged with great new danger and ambition. But is there any doubt that the government's reaction to that threat did more than the attacks themselves to change the nation and the world? Paul presumes I believe Cheney's impact was "very much for the worse," but the book does not say that. My personal views are rather more mixed. But the good-or-bad question frankly does not interest me as much as what really happened, and that's what Angler is about. Cheney, by the way, spoke recently to a closed-door meeting of business leaders. One of them told me afterward that the vice president brought up Angler, and recommended it. He didn't agree with everything there, not by a long shot, but he said the author "did his homework."