All by himself...

According to this article in the San Antonio Express-News - the outlet people turn to when standard 3-5 business day news delivery won't cut it - former Vice President Dick Cheney said he noticed former President Bush stop taking his advice during their second term in office.

Cheney - pictured at right contemplating the best way to retrieve The Precious - is currently writing his memoirs to be published in 2011 and reportedly mentioned that while reflecting he thought about how Bush became more distant as the years went on. (And on, and on, and on...for some of us.)

Some say that Bush stopped listening to Cheney's advice in his second term because there were increasing clues that it "led to bad policy" and was "harmful for the nation," but that's the same thing Russians said about Rasputin and look how strong they are now!

The article also says,

Barton Gellman, who earlier wrote a book on Cheney called "Angler," the former vice president believes Bush made concessions to public sentiment, something Cheney views as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end, Gellman says.

Agree with him or not, Bush was anything but an ordinary politician. Part of his confidence rested in the fact that he had extraordinary views of his ability to lead which, in the end, some could argue "led to bad policy" and was "harmful for the nation." (We keep getting back to that.)

In the end it doesn't really matter because it's all in the past and - even though Cheney is doing his sappiest Bridget Jones impersonation now - he made out just fine. Millions of others who have been ill-affected by the international and domestic policies he helped craft during Bush's first term? Not so much.