Still, the vice president was rebuffed by the Senate in October when it approved a measure he took the lead in fighting that would ban torture of terror suspects. The White House now says it wants to compromise as the House and Senate work out a final version. Those negotiations are being handled by national security adviser
Stephen Hadley.
And Cheney has been publicly reproached in recent weeks by two former colleagues: Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser when Cheney served in the elder
President Bush's administration, and Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff for then-Secretary of State
Colin Powell in the current one.
In a speech to the New America Foundation in October, Wilkerson called Cheney the leader of a secretive administration "cabal" that undermined the normal decision-making process in its push for war. Scowcroft, in a critique of administration policy in The New Yorker, said Cheney was "the real anomaly in the administration" and added, "Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."
That's the perspective of this week's cover of The New Yorker. In a drawing entitled "The Odd Couple," Cheney is a snarling, disheveled Oscar Madison, sprawled in an easy chair and surrounded by cold pizza and empty beer cans. Bush is a dismayed-looking Felix Unger, one arm akimbo, surveying the mess.
http://tinyurl.com/adugghere's the cover of the New Yorker: