Let someone writing a book on Vice President Dick Cheney write anything other than he’s a “Haliburton, War for Oil, Robbing Son of a Bitch”, and you’ll get a worthless and utterly biased review such as that offered by Newsweek. Uber Bush/Cheney hater Evan Thomas, follows the expected template in his “review” of Stephen Hayes new book on Cheney. These paragraphs drip with Thomas’s biased against anything that insults his preconceived views of his nemesis.

“Intelligence officials often talk about the importance of preparing for “worst-case scenarios.” Cheney seems to have always been ready for the worst. Maybe he learned not to count on good fortune after he lost his scholarship to Yale. Kicked out a second time, Cheney drifted back to Wyoming and was twice arrested for drunken driving. Hayes reports that Cheney always felt a sense of loyalty to Donald Rumsfeld because Rumsfeld persuaded President Gerald Ford to overlook Cheney’s youthful indiscretions when Cheney was under consideration to succeed Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff. It was during the Ford years that Cheney first began worrying about “continuity of government” questions‚Äîwhat happens if the top of the American government is “decapitated.” The nuclear threat of the cold war and two unsuccessful assassination attempts on President Ford explain some of Cheney’s early preoccupation, but not all of it. At the same time, Cheney first embraced his belief in asserting executive power‚Äîthe need for a strong president to rescue the country during crisis. Again, troubled times explain some of Cheney’s worries‚ÄîWatergate had undermined the power of the White House. But was there some deeper sense of personal foreboding, perhaps the mortality he felt from suffering his first heart attack at the age of 37?

In 30 hours of interviews, Hayes did not get Cheney to open up much about his thoughts or emotions. (Hayes’s previous book on Al Qaeda’s “collaboration” with Saddam Hussein must have smoothed access to the notoriously tight-lipped vice president.) He did, however, get Cheney to admit error, almost unheard of by the Bush administration. In hindsight, Cheney tells Hayes, the mechanism for postwar governance in Iraq was a failure. The administration would have been better off letting the Iraqis govern themselves from the outset. “I think the Coalition Provisional Authority was a mistake, wasted valuable time,” Cheney said. And from Hayes’s other interviews, it is possible to get a glimpse into Cheney’s threat-obsessed world, especially post-9/11.

Again the analogy of a rocket aimed at the moon. If it’s off by inches here it will miss by a million miles. Thomas viewed this book purely from his view of Bush lied, and from nothing else. Psychology my ass. Perhaps he’s read too many of the “make believe” that surrounds Bob Woodward’s wanderings into the scenes that never took place but could have, but he clearly didn’t spend more than two minutes reading this book, and considering his past why would he?