Interesting article, this guy tears Jr. and the Cheney's a new one, should be an interesting book:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/01/AR2007040101211_3.html?nav=most_emailed_emailafriendVic Gold heard from Lynne Cheney a few weeks before George W. Bush was sworn in as president in January 2001. Cheney had an assignment for her old friend: She wanted Gold to write the profiles of her and her husband, the new vice president, for the official Inauguration program.
The veteran journalist and GOP campaign operative was a natural choice. After all, he had shared an office with Lynne Cheney at Washingtonian magazine before she became chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities -- and they even worked on a satirical novel together.
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"For all the Rove-built facade of his being a 'strong' chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times," Gold writes. "Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots."
Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. "A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control."
For Gold, Cheney brings to mind the adage of Swiss writer Madame de Stael, who wrote, "Men do not change, they unmask themselves." Cheney has a deep streak of paranoia and megalomania, Gold suggests -- but he says he did not see it at first.
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But Gold says he recently wrote a letter to George H.W. Bush explaining himself and alerting him to the book -- and he says the former president offered a gracious reply to the effect of "You always called them like you saw them." On the few occasions they have talked or gotten together in recent years -- the last time was a "pleasant" lunch at Kennebunkport in the summer of 2005 -- Gold says he has purposely steered away from any talk of the current administration and his son, whom he refers to as "Young George."
"As a father, he's got to feel torn up because he sees this going on and obviously, obviously he has not been able to influence
," says Gold. "George W. had one of the greatest resources in foreign relations and political experience in the world -- his old man! What if he didn't have this hubris of 'I am going to do it on my own'? If he had listened to his old man in terms of what to do after 9/11 and everything, he wouldn't have been in the mess he is in right now, and the country would not be in the mess it is right now."