It's not just Cheney

As is so often the case, Publius hits the nail on the head:

We can complain all we want about Cheney, but the real story in the Post series is what a non-entity Bush has been during the course of his presidency. Bush outsourced the big, historical decisions of our age to an ad hoc, invisible institution known loosely as Cheney’s Office and stood by and did nothing while they wrecked everything they touched. So if you want to blame someone for Cheney’s excesses, you have to start with Bush.

But the blame doesn’t stop there. The reason Cheney’s Office got to dominate the executive branch is because we -- America -- elected a neophyte who lacked the experience, knowledge, and judgment to be president. In an ideal world, the presidential campaign should root someone like that out of the process -- not because he’s a conservative, but because he’s completely unqualified. But it didn’t. Our nation’s political machinery elevated a grossly inexperienced and ignorant man to the Oval Office. The entirely predictable result is that he would be forced to rely on someone else to make the decisions he wasn’t able or willing to make.

It’s pretty simple. When you elect someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, you’re essentially electing someone else to be president. Kerry and Gore had their flaws, but they would have been the Deciders. They certainly would not have tolerated a lawless, out-of-control operation such as Cheney’s Office. At the very least, they would have, you know, been aware of the debates and had some pre-existing knowledge to inform their judgment. Bush, by contrast, was simply no match for Cheney and Rumsfeld’s decades of experience.

Thus, the failure that is Cheney is not merely an individual failure on the part of Bush. Cheney is an institutional failure -- a failure of our political system. That’s the key to understand. The rise of Cheney is itself an indictment of our political institutions and culture.