Scorched earth runs in the family

Former Veep Dick Cheney has a new book out, entitled In My Time. Apparently, it's unapologetic. Naturally, Maureen Dowd came up with a more fitting title for the tome: Darth Vader Vents. "Why is it not a surprise to learn that Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea? Scorched earth runs in the family," she writes. "Vice’s new memoir ... veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong. His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book." I guess Dowd won't be gifting friends with it this Christmas. Though it springs from the grave, Herman Melville unknowingly wrote the best book review: "A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things." Cheney is in no danger of ever realizing that truism.