I doubt I can break much ground on whether Angler is pro- or anti-Cheney, or sufficiently balanced, or correct in its judgments. I'm happy to leave that judgment to readers. I do not claim, as I think my interlocutors here understand, that Angler is objective if that means it has no point of view. Not only is that impossible, but it's not what I wanted. Most of the work of the book is to tell new stories about what really happened, but Angler also tries to say why and how it happened, too, and in some cases to describe the consequences. I intended to make judgments on those things from a critical distance. I don't preoccupy myself as often with the normative, but I don't think that lands me in a "soup of relativisim," either. Reporting, analysis and commentary are not fully separable, probably, but that does not mean they are not fundamentally different things.

That's why I'm unpersuaded by many of Paul's examples:

He finds that Cheney ... produced a backlash that nearly brought down President Bush....

Bart finds that, thanks to Cheney, "the government collected information on a scale that potentially touched every American" (page 146). In a chapter called "Dark Side," he finds that the U.S. flouted "the negotiating history, and decades of practice under U.S. leadership" when, under Cheney's direction, we looked for "loopholes" to the Geneva Convention that would enable us to say accused terrorists have no Geneva rights (page 169)....

Bart finds that Cheney's policies environmental policies ran contrary to law and science (page 200) and harmed the environment ("no one filed an environment impact statement on the vice president," page 198). He suggests a number of times that, with respect to the war on terrorism, the overall policy Cheney pushed for and implemented produced something akin to "1967" (the beginning of the end in Vietnam), not "1947" (the beginning of a successful approach to the Cold War).

With due respect, those are are not commentaries on my part. They are facts, with substantial evidence marshalled for each of them, and thus far they are not even disputed by Cheney or his aides. The 1947-or-1967 comparison was made by Aaron Friedberg, Cheney's chief strategic planner for foreign affairs, and the verdict I described was his.

I wrote earlier that I'd describe some of my personal assessments of Cheney. Some are explicit in the book, others not. David summarized one set of judgments when he wrote:

Cheney is routinely described with awe and reverence by many of the sources here--and by and large Bart lets these judgments stand without challenge. Old colleagues and new visitors to Cheney's office alike paint the vice president as a quick study, exhibiting a command of policy minutiae, an iron will, and a finely honed strategic sense. In an administration that has become infamous for its incompetence, Cheney is the man who knows what he's doing.

I agree with all of that, with the proviso that Cheney had a tendency to overreach and defeat his own objectives. (Sometimes he was too dominant on an operational level for his own strategic good, as he defined his goals.) There's more in the plus column in the book: the narrative shows consistently that Cheney displayed, in addition to the qualities named just above, an enormous capacity for hard work, indifference to personal gain, and a consistent drive toward what he believed to be the common good. Those are no small virtues.

Angler displays other Cheney qualities that I do not admire. Cheney showed himself willing to break the rules of good process that he long espoused as essential, and the book shows the costs to the president and the nation. Process can be slow and muddy, but -- other things being equal -- I suppose I do believe it's better not to cut out the president's top advisers (secretaries of state and treasury, national security adviser, homeland security adviser, counterterrorism adviser, attorney general, etc.) when making decisions that fall smack into their portfolios. Other things being equal, we might prefer that a vice president tell the truth about a matter of vital national interest to the House majority leader in advance of a big vote. We have only Dick Armey's word that Cheney lied, but he was an old friend and ally of Cheney's with no known personal grudge apart from the issue at hand. Leaking a distorted version of Frank Keating's confidential questionnaire to Newsweek was also unattractive behavior, and suggested a certain ruthlessness about rivals. (This is Spencer's point, I believe.) Here again the accusers are old Cheney allies and rock-ribbed Republicans -- Keating and former Gov. John Engler of Michigan -- and it's a fact that Cheney had sole control of Keating's closely held vetting file. If Cheney did all these things, as strong evidence suggests, I do not doubt he believed he was serving a greater good. And we all would grant that ends justify means in some circumstances, up to a point. Many people, myself included, would say Cheney crossed the line. Readers of Power Line might even speak of "moral relativism."

Cheney crossed the line on secrecy, too. As so often, Cheney began with an obvious point -- that advice and deliberations work better with some shield of privacy -- and took it to an extreme. Improving White House deliberations is one valid public good, but secrecy works against others. Cheney did more than any predecessor to shield himself and others from scrutiny of their work, not only in real time but in the record left for history. Here I display the bias of my profession. I think public debate is central to self-government, not only for improving policy choices but as a foundational requirement of sovereignty for "We the People." (For more on that, look here.) Cheney's concept of democracy, Angler argues, is Burkean, and it misses half of what "representation" means. The vice president agrees that leaders must be authorized by the people to govern on their behalf, but he makes very little concession to accountability. Thus comes what I describe as his contempt for public opinion, and I do not think that is too strong a word.

The rightness or wrongness of Cheney's policy preferences are seldom addressed in the book, but I'll cop to Paul's charge that my disagreements are sometimes implied.

• I think the evidence is pretty clear that Cheney manipulated environmental science in his intervention in the Klamath River basin. If he was prepared to risk the extinction of endangered species to protect Oregon farmers, he could have invoked the cabinet panel empowered to make that choice -- and subject it to public debate. There is no doubt, as far as the courts are concerned, that native tribes had the rightful legal claim to the economic value of the water that Cheney diverted to farmers.

• I am skeptical of too much concentration of power, and so I do not approve of Cheney's contention that the president's decisions as commander in chief and as chief law enforcement officer are entirely beyond the rightful power of Congress and the courts to restrain.

• As a citizen, I cannot countenance the use of torture -- and here I use the long-established U.S. government term for some of the Cheney-backed "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- in my name. I think Paul may have misread, however, the passage he cites in my book. (On page 179, I ask whether we were "prepared to be a nation that did this sort of thing, torture or not-quite torture, if it worked.) That's equally a rebuke to liberals who want to say that torture is ineffective anyway, which would make the government's interrogation policy pointlessly monstrous. I think that's a copout, and my reporting suggests it is almost certainly untrue, even if rapport-building techniques are often more effective. As John McCain has testified, anyone will do as he is told under torture. As critics suggest, the victim of torture will happily make up stories if he thinks he'll be believed. But some of what interrogators want to know is factual and checkable. If a man discloses the password of an encrypted file, or the location of a buried cache, or the phone number last used by a confederate, his interrogators will find out fast whether he has told the truth. My point is that opponents of "cruelty" (in the sense meant by Geneva's Common Article 3 and the War Crimes Act) must be willing to make their case regardless of cruelty's effectiveness.

I studied enough moral philosophy to know there are probably extreme circumstances in which any president might order torture, just as any president might suspend fundamental civil liberties in a moment of extreme crisis. I think it's dangerous and undemocratic to accept those things as a matter of constitutional doctrine. If a president crosses a line like that, he should acknowledge it as a breach of law and mount a necessity defense in the court of public opinion. In some ways, his conduct is civil disobedience writ large, and like other practitioners of civil disobedience he must be prepared to face the consequences. Lincoln did exactly that after suspending habeas corpus, and the public backed him.

Anyone who wants my fuller verdict on Cheney can open Angler to page 388. The next seven pages, which close the book, put the matter as clearly as I know how.