Vice President for Life
(a short all too familiar portrait)

currently inhabiting to the Office of Vice President of the U.S. and the unpaid agent of Halliburton Corp with plenipotentiary powers to scare up new government contracts.
He told some vile rag down in Texas that he was on the ticket come 2004 which mean undetained future historians will be able to graph over eight years the billions of public dollars Cheney will be diverting to Halliburton.
Granted Dick isn't paid to do any of this, but assuming his heart holds out he can expect to be seamlessly reinserted into the Halliburton politburo once Bush's term ends...if indeed it ever does.
No doubt he will receive a huge bonus for special services and go on working his considerably fattened rolodex.
The funny thing about it all is, you just know Dick didn't score that cushy private sector sinecure on the basis of his business acumen. Nope, it was the long list of fatcat contacts he'd rolled up as a Congressman and Secretary of Defense...left to his own devices Dick Cheney couldn't run a child's lemonade stand without off book pay offs from lobbyists and U.S. Navy valets...who is he kidding?
But in DC's hyper profitable "iron triangle" of lobbyists, mid level bureaucrats and relevant congressmen, he is the King Swank Extremis.
The inestimable Joshua Micah Marshall characterizes the veep as the Admin's in house master of disaster...Cheney has been behind such embarrassments as the petrocrat heavy national energy commission, the phantom terrorism policy review that stagnated beautifully right up til 9-11, and lets not forget it was Dick's idea to make blabbermouth doofus Paul O'Neill Treasury Secretary.
In all a disheartening collection of gaffes and follies.
But none of that matters to Cheney, governance may fall to ruins due to ineptitude and callowness as long as the right giant private sector entities are insulated and enriched via government fiat.
Therefore, Dick is less a Vice President and more an ambassador plenipotentiary from the expanding world of monarchical corporatism.
Meanwhile we are stuck with this snarling cur as our Vice President...his smile suggests a torturer's apprentice on good day, and his governing ability, charisma, agenda are all as dust in the wind, it's the big money he can scare up from the vantage point of the Vice Presidency that matters.
This goes beyond corruption, mere venality no matter how grand is assumed to be the exception to the rule. No Dick Cheney is the prototype of a new purer breed of politician...the assumption of theft is built into the system now, we don't even question how Halliburton got the contract to snuff out Iraq's oil fires....we don't even question the inevitable flow of public dollars into a future compensation package for Cheney...it's like a new system of reverse taxation, the Admin's corporate sponsors have to get their cut of the budget and THEN the government gets to work with what is left over.
Sick
Demented
Typical...