The President and Dick Cheney: Drunk on Power and Ready for Rehab

Have you ever noticed how many millionaires are called eccentric? My guess is that most people are strange but they just don't have the money to act on it. We are, in effect, forced to be normal. Our limited means disguise the weirdness - they limit how crazy we can get.

Nobody is completely in control on their own. We do things all the time that are responses to outside pressure. We're kept in line by our spouses for example, or by the need to stay employed, and that's a good thing. If given the opportunity to run completely wild, most of us would get in some really big trouble and I mean in a hurry.

That's what happened to the Bush administration. Everyone says they were lucky to have a spineless, rubber-stamping, Republican Congress to roll over - a Congress so corrupt they couldn't even protect the male pages. Political pundits saw this as a great bit of good fortune for the President and his ever-present driving force, Dick Cheney. It was not.

Maybe I'm just trying to be magnanimous this morning, but I've been fantasizing on ways the Bush administration could have turned out great. Okay, not great, but much better than they have. Maybe it's because we're a couple of days from the 2-year mark left in this disaster, and I'm frantically trying to think of a way to salvage something good before it ends.

Wait, I know what's behind this. The Bush administration is now seen as such a huge mess, that I'm kind of drawn to it as a puzzle. It's a political Rubik's Cube. Try to imagine a set of circumstances where talent this bad could have still produced greatness. There has to be a way that would have propelled these guys to make more of themselves.

I believe the biggest misfortune they faced was a lack of external controls. Do you know why President Bush quit drinking? It wasn't Jesus, or some personal revulsion at his behavior. If so, that would have happened before his 40s. No, to hear President Bush tell it, he quit drinking when Laura threatened to leave if he didn't. There's the external control. If he had a Congress that had said, "If you ignore the Constitution, we will impeach you and then imprison you", he might have turned out all right. There was no national sofa to exhile him to.

Plus he had his mean, little, running buddy, Dick Cheney. He's the guy who pulls up in the pickup truck and takes George out for a night on the town. The crazy thing is that Dick Cheney must have some actual ability as a manager - as an executive. He has had a long career in politics with vast experience, so he must be good at it on some level. So why did he turn out so rotten?

My theory is that Cheney is one of those guys who is drunk on power. He needs a strong figure supervising him - someone who can say, "Enough. Knock it off." Instead he got George, a person he could walk all over. Most pundits say how fortunate Cheney was to get to be the most powerful Vice President in U.S. history. I see it differently. He was unlucky in not having someone who could save him from the shallowness of his own soul.

This is a reckless man here - just ask the lawyer he shot in the face. Cheney's problem was that he had no controls placed on him. He was allowed to be a maniac by an unfortunate set of circumstances, many of which he helped bring about. There was nobody to keep him in check and force him to be a better man.

Then you get 9/11. Whether you think that was a false flag operation managed by an international cabal of neo-con criminals - as I do - or a simple terrorist attack, 9/11 was the final piece that unleashed the worst administration of all time. That event took the People out of their traditional role as the greatest check on those in power. We saw how it could work later when everyone rose up after the Dubai Port Security Deal was announced, but for the most part, the People were knocked down emotionally and mad as hell after 9/11, and they responded by letting President Bush do whatever he wanted.

The stage was set. A couple of immature chicken hawks suddenly had no impediments to acting out their imperial bloodlust. George Bush and Dick Cheney had absolute power and they screwed up absolutely.

Things have changed somewhat. I noticed President Bush has backed off on the NSA surveillance issue. He now has to go to an independent court and get permission to wiretap as it should be. He's doing better because there is now some external control from the Democrats helping him stay in line.

The question is whether Congress and to a greater extent, the American People, will sit President Bush down and have "The Talk." We need to be the National Laura Bush right now who tells President Bush that he can no longer be drunk on power. He has to sober up. Otherwise, we're not leaving - he's going to jail.

He also has to stop being so influenced by his phony-macho, power-drunk running buddy, Dick Cheney. We need to make clear that we think Cheney's been a bad influence on him, and they both have to sober up and start acting right or they're going to be in real trouble.

We don't need a couple of eccentric millionaires acting out their drunken power trips and ruining the lives of those around them. These two have a sickness and they need help. It's time for America to put them into power rehab. Then they can spend their last years in office, trying to make it up to us for the damage they've caused.