"BECAUSE I THINK IT, IT IS RIGHT."

A very good friend of mine who has given his entire adult life to government and military service — and who is the 2nd smartest person I’ve ever known — said this to me as George Bush prepared to take office in 2001:

“If Bush didn’t have Cheney, I’d be worried. But I’ve been around Cheney. I’ve worked with him. He is smart, tough, will do what needs to be done. The right way.”

At that time, this very good friend of mine was the smartest person I’d ever known. And what he said made me breathe a little easier. I relaxed about the prospect of an inarticulate addict taking the highest office.

(Yes, I meant to type “addict.” For me "addict" is synonymous with “drunk." As a born-again Christian, George W. Bush has simply traded one addiction for another, in my completely underqualified medical/spiritual assessment. This is not to say that all born-again Christians have traded one addiction for another … just all the ones I have come across. So for the sake of a classic Irish-Catholic snap judgment — yes, without a doubt, all born-again Christians are trading up in the addiction showroom. And furthermore — any ideologue, regardless of their spiritual affiliation, political stripe or acting technique, is a kook. So there. )

Anyway, this friend of mine assured me that all would be cool with Cheney lurking the halls of power.

It is a measure of the genius gap between Smartest People I’ve Ever Known #’s 1 & 2 and the rest of us that this friend has fallen only one spot after such a monumentally dickheaded assessment.

The last thing I’m going to do is catalogue all the deceit, treachery, fleecing, spilled blood, criminal acts, public profanity and fart jokes for which Bush and Cheney are responsible.

But I will mention two things:

1. My father-in-law — a respected psychologist — told me about a study done at Duke University. The study examined — if I got everything straight — presidential behavior from the Carter administration to the present in order to explore why presidents invariably become too big for their britches and do power-mad, idiotic things. In a nutshell, it’s the “Because I think it, it is right” syndrome. There are no rules in this rarified air of unchallenged opinions. These men actually begin to believe that they can —and should — act with impunity; that they know best and everyone else can just pucker up and smooch their imperial buttocks.

This is why Bush has gone off the rails and Cheney is growing horns and cloven hooves as we speak. They believe in their own infallibility. So did Clinton and Bush the Elder. Which brings me directly to —

2. Why in the name of Nixon Weinberger Rich Libby do we even have presidential pardons?
— I will be forever in the debt of whoever can educate me as to why we allow rich, privileged men to upend the judicial system in service of bailing out their criminal, scuzball friends and covering their own asses. Why do we do that? Why do we diminish ourselves in that way?

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.