Cheney Formula: Rearranging tangled sheets of his nighttime fevers into semblance of well-made bed

[kpete]

Cheney, unlike Bush, was an unillusioned man. He did not believe that American missiles could seed the barren soil of Iraq with liberal democracy (though he did believe that Iraqis would strew petals on arriving U.S. tanks). He does not appear to have believed that God was guiding his hand -- the kind of magical thinking that Bush taught us, by example, to fear. Cheney was not transfixed by such lights; and yet he was transfixed by something dark. Perhaps it was what journalist Ron Suskind called "the one percent doctrine": the belief that America could not afford to take even a 1 percent risk of attack. But that was Cheney's own formulation, rearranging the tangled sheets of his nighttime fevers into the semblance of a well-made bed.

fascinating discussion:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/31/lightning_rod