Just how much evidence do we need? How much evidence that pretty much every miscue and goof that comes out of the Bush White House will sooner or later be found to have Dick Cheney’s fingerprints all over it? The White House is now taking hits on two fronts — hits which, by most 
accounts, are the driving factors behind the president’s slipping job approval numbers. One of those hits is over the North Korea crisis, the other is tied to the increasingly negative reaction to president’s stimulus package.
As we’ve noted earlier, the policy of confrontation on the Korean Peninsula, which the administration is now running away from and which has gotten the US into such a jam, was most forcefully backed by Cheney.
There is also a growing consensus that the president’s new stimulus/tax cut plan is a loser both politically and in policy terms. Democratic opposition is to be expected, certainly, though perhaps not unanimous opposition. But the president’s real problem is deteriorating support among Senate Republicans. Public support is tepid at best. Out of the gate with a quick gallop, the plan has been getting iffy to bad press ever since. (David Broder: “It Reeks of Politics,” Jan. 12, 03 … ) True, the ‘dividend tax cut’ doesn’t have quite the sound of the ‘yacht basin wet slip rental fee tax credit’ but it still just doesn’t seem to sell all that well.
Not surprisingly, the prime mover, as Major Garrett reports in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, was none other than Dick Cheney.
In spite of all the evidence most beltway chatterers still insist on seeing Cheney as the White House’s shrewdest political hand. But they don’t know Dick. Someday someone is going to put together an article cataloging just how many screw-ups Dick Cheney has been responsible for in the last two years. Or wait a minute …
