Woodward revealed on "60 Minutes" that Henry Kissinger is a regular presence around the White House, meeting with Cheney/Bush on a monthly basis. Sadly, Kissinger has the ear of Cheney in particular and as Woodward described, Kissinger is using Iraq as a deja vu experiment, trying to finally get the wrongs of Vietnam right through a war occurring decades later.

Then as Maureen Dowd wrote in her recent column, "It’s been clear for years that Dick Cheney and Rummy have been using the Bush presidency like an elaborate vanity production to replay Watergate and Vietnam, and to try to reverse things that bothered them during prior stints in the Nixon and Ford administrations." So Kissinger's looking to get a re-do on Vietnam and meanwhile the Manchurian duo, Cheney/Rummy, are looking to take out their aggressions from the last ruined administration they were associated with and to this time around make the White House more like a king's palace. Madness.

Dowd also writes:

As Mr. Woodward notes, part of Rummy’s allure for W. was the fact that Poppy Bush considered him an arrogant, Machiavellian sort who could get you in deep doo-doo. “It was a chance,” Mr. Woodward says, “to prove his father wrong.” Or right.

It's interesting how GW's reign continues to portray the father's presidency in an increasingly better light. The father apparently had the right instincts about Mach-daddy Rummy, and the father also knew enough to get the hell out of Iraq when he/we had the chance. I guess GW was looking to once again prove daddy wrong, believing Iraq could be made into America II. But the father also believed supply-side economics to be "voodoo science" and he responsibly raised taxes when he was forced with a situation that required fiscal prudence. Oh, and these days, it appears as if the father gets along with Bill Clinton better than sonny boy GW, with that charity thing they run together and much buzzed about rumors that GW and Papa hardly ever speak.

So the father can at least thank his son for making his less-than-stellar stint at President look better in a relative sense (at the expense of we Americans). But then again, in due time GW will make Harding look like FDR.