Democrats are so eager to have Bush ax Cheney because they know it would be a sign of weakness and play as an admission that their charges against him have been accurate. It would be the most important Democratic takedown since Robert Bork and Newt Gingrich, and the Bush campaign knows it. "For years the left's strategy has been to go after effective conservatives on a personal basis," a Bush campaign official says. "That's the modus operandi. The political game is personal destruction."
What of the substantive charges against Cheney? He kept the proceedings of his energy task force secret in order to establish an important point about executive powers -- and won a preliminary battle in the Supreme Court. He was formerly chairman of Halliburton. So what? Halliburton had the same arrangement to provide emergency work overseas with the Clinton administration that it does with the Bush administration. Cheney has been one of the strongest hawks on Iraq. Thanks in part to his advocacy, in a historically and strategically central country in the Middle East there is now a popular government waging the fight against terror in almost exactly the same terms as Bush. Gosh. What a fool Dick Cheney is!
For all these reasons and more, the Bush team's reaction to calls for Cheney's scalp is a politer version of the vice president's recent famous rebuke of Sen. Pat Leahy -- buzz off.