Richard Nixon's final days in the White House were lonely ones. The soon-to-resign president roamed the halways talking to portraits of dead presidents. Will Bunch says that you have to wonder if Dick Cheney is having conversations with Nixon's portrait these days. Writes Will:"Cheney's long strange trip through American politics pretty much began in the Nixon White House in the early 1970s, and much of his public life seems like a crusade to avenge his misunderstood ex-boss. At the height of Watergate, he told friends it wasn't a scandal but 'a power struggle,' and as top aide to Nixon's successor Gerald Ford, he chafed so much at the post-Watergate restrictions on White House power that he honed his bizarre theory of an allpowerful unitary executive."Those aren't the lessons that most Americans took away from the Nixon years, and yet they are shaping our nation's government some 33 years later. Even so, we never expected Cheney to look to Nixon for inspiration on handling the fiasco that is Iraq. Until now. Check out the echoes of 1968 in what Cheney said earlier this week on his Asia junket . . . "
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