More hard-hitting analysis from Time

I don't have much of a sustained argument here...I'd rather just point out how bland, debatable and arrogant most of this article is. Liberal bias? I guess. Really stupid fluff? Definitely.

"Cheney was so driven and hands-on, the aides would say, that he and Libby would routinely ask to see raw intelligence rather than the processed analysis put together by the CIA and other agencies."

He listened to phone calls still in Arabic? He looked at satellite photos without labels?

"What was really on trial was the whole culture of an Administration that treated the truth as a relative virtue, as something it could take or leave as it needed."

Nope. Wrong. Libby was on trial. He was just Cheney's chief of staff. Had Cheney or Rove been indicted, you would have come closer to trying "the whole culture." That statement remains a poetic hyperbole.

"Everyone knows now that Bush and Cheney took the country into a deadly, costly and open-ended war on flimsy evidence of weapons of mass destruction."

I don't think so. No way. I doubt a majority of the country would assent to that statement as phrased. So even if that's what Bush and Cheney actually did, that statement is false.

"When the verdict against Libby came down, it was also a rebuke to the hermetic power-sharing arrangement at the top of the White House. "

No it wasn't. I don't know what it was. It wasn't that.

"Libby's conviction comes at the end of a dreadful year for Cheney."

No it doesn't. I mean, his year wasn't great, but there's a freaking war on, okay? And I swear, if I hear one more thing about how Dick Cheney's daughter's existence somehow refutes the Iraq war, my head asplode.

TIME actually plays its hand and admits the whole article is a sham at the end:

"So long as Bush remains Commander in Chief, however, and Cheney his faithful lieutenant, the Vice President's power will flow through the Oval Office."

Always close persuasive essays by contradicting your thesis.