WP: The Ba-Da-Boom Crew
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, January 30, 2007; Page A17
If you've been following the Lewis "Scooter" Libby perjury trial, I can understand how you might confuse Dick Cheney with Tony Soprano. Cheney's office is beginning to sound a lot like the Bada Bing, minus the dancers.
Court has been in session for only a week, and already we've heard about characters being set up (Libby, allegedly, to save political wizard Karl Rove), strung along (media bigwigs, who were to be played like patsies), buried in mud (former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the raison d'etre of the Iraq war) and ratted out (the famously leak-averse Cheney, revealed to be willing to leak like a washerless faucet when it suits his purposes).
Cheney's no Tony, though. For one thing, Tony would never let one of his top henchmen go by a preppy-sounding handle such as "Scooter." For another, this kind of all-in-the-family mess would send Tony moping to his long-suffering shrink, whereas Cheney shows no inclination to deal with uncomfortable issues or face harsh realities....
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You get the sense of Cheney and his crew as a semi-independent power center, a family within the larger family. You see them hunkered down in their office suite, much like Tony and crew in the back room of the Bada Bing, plotting ways to cover their behinds and do in their rivals -- whether those rivals are found in Baghdad, Tehran or the West Wing.
Scooter worried he was being thrown to the wolves, according to his attorney. A note scribbled by Cheney, the lawyer says, revealed that he had smelled a plan to "sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder."
Now that really sounds like something you'd expect to happen in Tony's world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/29/AR2007012901449.html