There is something sinister in the way Dick Cheney had us believe George W. Bush was still president of the United States, assuming he ever was.

Bush's position and titles were manufactured in the White House Situation Room. This becomes painfully apparent as his term winds down.

According to The Associated Press, Cheney and others met in the Situation Room after the Sept. 11 attacks to discuss when waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques (See: torture) could be used in the anti-terror campaign.

They didn't bother the president with such weighty matters. Perhaps they remember his doe-eyed stare when told the nation was under attack.

The AP reported that Cheney presided over a kind of star chamber. The members of this shadow government, which included high-ups in the Justice Department and CIA, drafted harsh interrogation techniques and discussed other punishments.

Such discussions, not surprisingly, resulted in circumvention of the FISA court, extraordinary renditions, violations of civil liberties and human rights and national security letters. They led to the manipulation of the media, Congress and Scooter Libby's involvement in the Plame affair.

Cheney was supposed to bring gravitas to the ticket. Instead we got sexual perversion and Abu Ghraib.

What the AP reported from an anonymous source gives new meaning to then-CIA Director George Tenet's boast that waging war with Iraq would be "a slam dunk." As they say in Bush World, dunk 'em if you got 'em.

After 9/11, it was Cheney who claimed authority to tell the military to shoot down civilian planes for national security reasons. To the best of our knowledge, nothing happened.

Yes, fellow Americans, we slept through the coup. All of us — the voters, the press, the courts, Congress and even the president.

More than 4,000 dead U.S. troops in Iraq later, the coup staged covertly and quietly at home was noisy and bloody abroad.

Still is. "So?" as Cheney would say. Was it worth it? Hell, no! When do we get our country back?

Ronald Reagan gave us a Teflon presidency; George W. Bush gave us plain old Naugahyde, vinyl made to look as tough as cowboy leather. He is the show horse. Cheney is the workhorse. Bush is the talker. Cheney is the doer.

Thanks to some wonderful reporting and Freedom of Information Act requests, we now know that the administration has been like a Molière farce. In this farce, an elder statesman's idiot son is given an important job to keep him out of trouble, except the boob keeps finding it, and Papa's friends must keep bailing him out.

The player who poses in the background — enter Dick Cheney — actually turns out to be the villainous star.

When Bush first coined "axis of evil," he meant North Korea, Iraq and Iran. But the "other axis of evil" — the cabal of neocons doing Cheney's bidding — threatens our country from the inside out. People in Justice, Defense and State conspired with the co-president to foster the imperial presidency we have today. Bush is culpable for much, but not all, of what's happened.

Molière could not have conceived anything as extraordinary as what has played across the American stage since September 2001. But at least Molière's compositions were funny and fictional. The American people aren't laughing about what Bush has done. But we aren't exactly doing much about it, either.

We've lost count of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors by this administration and its apparatchiks. We've become complacent and no longer can muster the shock and awe necessary to change this disastrous course.

But that won't change what we know: The Decider wasn't and still isn't.

Maybe this all started before the presidency itself. Say, back when Cheney was asked to help Bush find a running mate and then picked himself. And to think they call Hillary Clinton calculating.

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (rlokeman@creators.com) is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss Lokeman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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