Dick Cheney, menace

From Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times about Dick Cheney:

"[Cheney and Rumsfeld] turned back the clock to the Nixon era, bringing back presidential excesses like wiretapping along with presidential power. As attorney general, John Ashcroft clamped down on the Freedom of Information Act. For two years, the Pentagon has been sitting on a request from The Times's Jeff Gerth to cough up a secret 500-page document prepared by Halliburton on what to do with Iraq's oil industry - a plan it wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.)..."

[And she quotes Cheney:] "'I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the cold war, as well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy,' he intoned. Translation: Back off, Congress and the press.

"Checks, balances, warrants, civil liberties - they're all so 20th century."

[Later she ends with these words:] "Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace."