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Time Magazine’s cover story deals with the Bush-Cheney relationship and details their last days in the White House.

Hours before they were to leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. For over a month Cheney had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity by senior White House officials. The Libby pardon, aides reported, had become something of a crusade for Cheney, who seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship with Bush to the breaking point — and perhaps past it — over the fate of his former aide. “We don’t want to leave anyone on the battlefield,” Cheney argued.

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And there was a darker possibility. As a former Bush senior aide explains, “I’m sure the President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up.” It had been an article of faith among Cheney’s critics that the Vice President wanted a pardon for Libby because Libby had taken the fall for him in the Fitzgerald probe.

It was obvious from the outset that Libby was biting the bullet for Cheney.  The only surprise is that Bush stood up to Cheney and did not issue the pardon.  Good for him.  It took eight years for The Decider to finally make a half-decent decision.

The downside to all of this is that the real felon in this scandal is Cheney himself who along with Karl Rove were responsible for the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.  The following is as good a description you’ll ever read about the method by which Cheney ran the country for eight years.

A former White House chief of staff, Congressman and Pentagon boss, Cheney had an uncanny ability to guide Bush’s decisions. Even as he claimed expansive Executive powers for the President, Cheney salted the bureaucracy with allies who could alert him in advance about policy disagreements, help him influence internal debates at key moments and give him a leg up in framing issues for the President. He was always deferential to Bush, often waiting with head down and hands clasped behind his back to address the President. Both by habit and by design, he cultivated a relationship that suited Bush’s view of their roles: the President as the “decider” and Cheney as the éminence grise who counseled him. In reality, by wiring the bureaucracy and being the last person Bush spoke with on many key decisions, Cheney became a “sounding board for advice he originated himself,” as biographer Barton Gellman put it.

And all the while, the Decider did the bidding of the Puppetmeister, clueless and unaware of the many strings  firmly attached to his body.  Amazing.

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