In an interview on NBCâ??s â??Dateline,â? former Vice President Dick Cheney says that his new book, â??In My Time,â? will have â??heads exploding all over Washington.â? Whatever readers think of Mr. Cheneyâ??s politics, their heads are more likely to explode from frustration than from any sense of revelation. Indeed, the memoir â?? delivered in dry, often truculent prose â?? turns out to be mostly a predictable mix of spin, stonewalling, score settling and highly selective reminiscences.
The book, written with his daughter Liz, reiterates Mr. Cheneyâ??s aggressive approach to foreign policy and his hard-line views on national security, while sidestepping questions about many of the Bush administrationâ??s more controversial decisions, either by cherry-picking information (much the way critics say the White House cherry-picked intelligence in making the case to go to war against Iraq) or by hopping and skipping over awkward subjects with loudly voiced assertions. Itâ??s ironic that Mr. Cheney â?? who succeeded in promulgating so many of his policy ideas through his sheer mastery of bureaucratic detail â?? should have written a book that is often so lacking in detail that it feels like a blurred photograph.
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