Dick Cheney, maniac?

Foreign Policy columnist James Traub goes all Dr. Freud on former Veep Dick Cheney: "I have always been inclined to think of Cheney as the Lucifer of George W. Bush's administration, manipulating the Boy President with his dark and sinister arts. On reflection, however, I think I have given the former vice president too much credit for cool rationality. ... Cheney was the silent custodian of dreadful secrets ... But they weren't secrets; they were nightmares. Cheney was a supremely rational man in the grip of mania." Moreover, Traub thinks Mr. Cheney was darkly transfixed by the "One Percent Doctrine." That is, "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." Yet another reason to be thankful that the Bush administration is now forever confined to the past tense. We're lucky to have survived it.