The right has blamed Obama for just going along with public sentiment
instead of "doing the right thing". I wonder how they will feel about
Bush's term now that this is out......

"When the president made decisions that I didn't agree with, I still
supported him and didn't go out and undercut him," Cheney said,
according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. "Now we're
talking about after we've left office. I have strong feelings about what
happened. ... And I don't have any reason not to forthrightly express
those views."

According to the author of the Post piece, Barton Gellman, who earlier
wrote a book on Cheney called "Angler," the former vice president
believes Bush made concessions to public sentiment, something Cheney
views as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of
resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be
more like an ordinary politician in the end, Gellman says.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," Gellman
quoted a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply.
"He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he
took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had
gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice.
He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming."

The Post quoted John P. Hannah, Cheney's second-term national security
adviser, as saying Cheney remains driven, now as before, by the
possibility of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons from a nation
hostile to the U.S.

What is new, Hannah said, is Cheney's readiness to acknowledge "doubts
about the main channels of American policy during the last few years," a
period encompassing most of Bush's second term.