Bush is fair game now too! Oh hell, we all know he don't know nuttin.

Bush will always be blamed for the shit Cheney was doing behind the curtain, unfortunately.

You have to ask yourself if it would have been better or worse had Cheney not been there though.

Better - much better I think.

Yes, better.

I'd agree. Bush is instinctively a much better person than Cheney.

To bad that fact is lost on so many who hate and blame Bush or by proxy all conservatives for anything they disagree with.

I always thought that was the plan, Bush was the folksy, bumbling, guy people would like to have beer with front man. Electable and manipulable, put up by Cheney, Rove etc. so that they could weild power and deflect responsibility.

The NTSB just released a photo of the suspects who brought down the plane...

http://i184.photobucket.com/albums/x.../Taligeese.jpg

If Cheney was not there, then George Jr would have never been offered the job. We know this relationship from a meeting between Quayle and Cheney eight years ago. Quayle explains the VP job to Cheney. A job full of pomp and image. Cheney then smiled and said, "I have a special relationship with this president."

Every so often, George Jr would decide to act as president. For example, he completely rejected Cheney's list for the Supreme Court. Instead, he nominated his own lawyer - Harriet Myers. So Cheney took revenge. Cheney withdrew all support for that nominee. George quickly had to withdrawal that nomination. This is how Cheney kept his front man in line. This was the special relationship.

Powell made if obvious. After a meeting, the senior staff would leave. Cheney and George Jr would consult for two minutes. Then senior staff would return to be told of "George Jr's" decision.

As Beest noted: So Condi Rice and Wolfovitz spent 18 months before the election teaching George Jr about the world. That was the plan. George Jr was taught the sound byte responses to all questions - to be the front man. Cheney made the decisions.

The movie "W." demonstrates how this worked.

More interesting is how decisions (if any at highest levels) were being made in the last three months. There seems to have been a complete breakdown in that process. Senior staff (ie Paulson and Bernanke) were making decisions independently without any curiosity or coordination from the rest of that administration. Even the Annapolis Conference completely vaporized with virtually no follow up except tepid actions by Condi Rice. It was as if the entire administration had no guidance. Any effort or threat to tow the line appears to have completely disappeared except when George Jr stepped in to change a decision (ie the second TARP request). George Jr apparently had only one objective - to make a smooth transition with Obama.

Events such as no pardon for Libby imply a complete breakdown in leadership in the last three months. What happened in these last three months will make interesting reading.

I'm a bit late, but that pilot isn't a hero. In fact, he's a lousy pilot. If he were any good he would have barrel-rolled his plane through the bird flock and never touched any of them. Then he couldn't even find a bloody airport. Old guy losing his touch. Fire him.

So your cite on all this is a movie? ok.

Obviously not. Maybe 100 different sources are cited. The movie "W." is how the layman can appreciate what hundreds of insiders have been saying for years.

Why would you confuse an example with actual sources?

tw - are you serious? There is not one cite in that post. Perhaps because the movie is the closest thing to a source provided by tw.

Perhaps tw doesn't know what citing a source is?

He posted his summation of a bits and pieces of information, and speculation, that have been posted on the web and published in a bunch of different publications.

There's probably not one person in the world that knows exactly what went down. The best we can do is add as many pieces of the puzzle as we can find and see how it fits. But that's a hell of a lot of work, like the research good authors do, and the chance of getting 100% right is rarely possible.

That said, we can get a feeling for when the workings of a organization shift direction or seem to have no direction at all.