Discussing the president's weighing his options on throwing Scooter Libby a lifeline, Michael Isikoff writes in Newsweek: "Hanging over his deliberations was Cheney, who had said he was 'very disappointed' with the jury's verdict. Cheney did not directly weigh in with Fielding, but nobody involved had any doubt where he stood. 'I'm not sure Bush had a choice,' says one of the advisers. 'If he didn't act, it would have caused a fracture with the vice president.' " I love that image of Dick Cheney claiming to be "very disappointed with the jury's verdict" (though I'm sure he still respected the bejesus out of it.) Anybody else picturing that little Martian who always used to say that he wasn't angry, but "terribly, terribly hurt" whenever he'd get blown up by Bugs Bunny?

But what's really eye-catching here is the way the reader is primed to recoil in horror at the thought of Bush's relationship with the vice-president hitting a speed bump. This is President Who-Cares-What-You-Think, the guy who saw his dad's feelings about the Iraq War as irrelevant, and who openly spurned people (James Baker, Brett Scowcroft) known to be acting as his father's consiglieres. Bush famously described his "earthly father" as "the wrong father" to consult at times like these, and it's been generally assumed that the father he was consulting was the guy in the sky. But it seems clear by now that Dick Cheney has taken over as the father Bush always wanted, the one who lets him feel like a big man by pumping up his ego and pretending that he's the one making the decisions, yet somehow we always go where Dick wants us to go. And of all possible fathers, who could be more unearthly like Dick Cheney?

It's normally kind of tacky to engage in this kind of penny ante psychoanalysis of public figures, but let's get real: not many grown-ups just wear their issues on their sleeve the way George, Jr. does. I do wonder just when Cheney knew what he had in Bush, knew that he could point him in any direction he wanted and the little fella would nod, if only because he feel so terriifed at being left to his own devices that he'd practically stroke out at the thought of a "fracture" between them. When Cheney first took the job of helping Bush select his running mate, and then selected himself, and Bush thought that was dandy, it must have told him a lot, but was it enough for him to know instinctively that there was nothing there? Granted, a lot of people had Bush sized up to a tee at that point. But that still leaves the national media, the editorial board of The Economist, everybody who voted for Nader...a hell of a lot of people who didn't understand Bush as well as Dick Cheney did. And there's no evidence of Dick Cheney ever understanding anything besides George Bush in his whole time on Earth. Makes you think. And shudder a little.