On Election Night, people noted spontaneous street parties when the election was called for Obama, and the phrase “It’s like we overthrew a dictator” struck me.
Well, Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales have been indicted by a south Texas grand jury for a 2006 conflict of interest which constituted a criminal conspiracy as well as responsibility for individual acts of assault, in quashing an investigation of a private prison system owned in part by the Vanguard Group which Cheney owns, in a 2006 disclosure, between $6M and $30M in.  I believe that the judge still has the option to throw out the verdict.

While people have posted things like “It was the IRS that finally took down Al Capone”…  I don’t think this will stick, and I don’t think it will even require pardon power.  A mutual fund like Vanguard is not an adequate connection – the money is managed at a great distance, they’re a giant company with many different traders and index funds and financial products.  I would attribute his interference in the investigation to anything else – basic ideology, bribes, friendships, campaign contributions, before I would attribute it to a financial interest made at such a distance.  He’s probably more likely to be doing a personal favor for someone at Vanguard than looking out for his own investments.  But who knows…

If it were valid, it still wouldn’t stick because of the institutional respect for the Vice President’s office and the controversy surrounding the outgoing prosecutor who moved the jury forward.   Even if we assume that there was an actual scandal that’s been uncovered here and the legal system were in favor of taking Cheney down, there’s still the black helicopter brigade to get past – and there are limitless coercive methods that they can use within Cheney’s constitution.

Cheney is a fascinating character responsible for a great deal of the sheer creepiness of the last eight years.  Working behind the scenes he’s been as much if not more influential than Karl Rove’s campaign to politicize everything, and he’s done it with utter disregard for his own reputation or common sense precedents.  Setting ‘neoconservative hawk’ as the persistent stance of his entire party, forming his own intelligence agency, helping to politicize the Justice Department, relentlessly pursuing the establishment of absolute, unquestionable power for the executive branch… This has been a man driven not by public opinion or personal ambition, but by committment to some dark path chosen long ago.  Noone has really satisfactorily explained his motivations, and while ‘Pure Evil’ is a mythically rare orientation, he seems satisfied to be branded that as long as it doesn’t interfere with The Important Work He’s Doing.
LithiumCola has a few words on the topic in an extremely intriguing diary on DailyKos, while covering David Bromwich’s New York Times review of several books about Cheney:

…we want to acknowledge that there is/was something unique at work in the Bush years.  Putting this unique thing, this singularity, into words, without fudging our acknowledgment of the past, is a worthwhile project.  It’s worthwhile because we want to understand just what happened in the first years of the 21st century and why it felt and feels so singularly dangerous — a feeling as of standing on a precipice and feeling the chill breeze of oblivion greet us from below.

…

Cheney does not seem to care about America.  Not in any sense – not in the right-wing “love it or leave it” America-Firster’s sense and not in the libertarian land-of-opportunity lover’s sense.  That Cheney was born into this country seems entirely incidental to his desire to rule it.  There is nothing even a little bit familial about his particular style of powermongering.  We might as well have been French, or Chilean, for all that Cheney cares.  The only thing the American system did was slow him down.

…

On this telling, Cheney used his years in Congress only to weaken Congress (see his minority report on Iran-Contra) and to gather up information that could be used against others later.  That’s it.  The suggestion of such premeditation and single-bloody-mindedness invites rejection.  No one is really like that.  But, then again . . .

Perhaps it is just this refusal to acknowledge the alien sensibility that allowed Cheney to get so far.  He is not out for personal glory – he shuns it.  He is not out for money – he has money.  He is not out to make America better place to live in any sense.  So what is it?  He seems to have only one, nonsensical goal: to make the Presidency into a dictatorship.  But to what end?