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Former President George W. Bush, in remarks being prepared for the Fox News Channel’s annual “Too Good To Check” news standards workshop, confirms that former Vice President Dick Cheney consulted him on all major issues as promised, and that the job of president is what he hoped it would be.
His remarks are apparently meant as a direct response to Vice President Joe Biden’s recent remarks that President Obama regularly consults him on all major issues.
“There’s not a single decision he made that he hadn’t asked for my view after he had made it,” Bush will say in his remarks.
Bush said he accepted the chance to be Cheney’s president on condition that he would be an important consultant and confidante to the vice president.
“He kept his end of the bargain,” Bush said of Cheney, describing himself as “one of the last people who had the opportunity to make my case to him. Dick always said, “W., I’ll be the decision-maker, but you’ll be the Decider –and that’s with a capital D.”
Bush says in his remarks that it was Cheney’s decision to always lock all the doors in the Oval Office behind him, whenever he would come in to advise him. “It was like, you know, he only wanted me to know what he was going to tell me. That showed me how much he respected the Office.”
Bush specifically cites Cheney’s initiative to teach the president’s Scottish terrier Barney to attack journalists as an example of how “the vice president consulted me before he sent Barney off to that new Michael Vick Obedience School in Virginia.”
Bush also says that it was later in his first term that he decided to rescind his original request that Cheney stay in the background at staff and Cabinet meetings, because everybody was looking to him first.
“But it kind of spooked me; he looked like too much like Nosferatu. Unfortunately, turned out he liked being there so much, he wouldn’t come back. But he told me he wasn’t coming back to the table, so it still counts as consultation.”
Bush said he grew to enjoy his vice president’s obsession with secrecy and his shadowiness, especially when issuing his “consultations” from an “undisclosed location.”
“It was like playing forts,” Bush says. “At times it was like being a kid again. He was my imaginary friend.”
Bush will admit there were some glitches along the way in their “special relationship.”
“Like when he explained to me that ‘waterboarding’ was kind of like surfing,” Bush states. “I probably should have asked him to be more specific.”
In an unrelated item, Vice President Joe Biden said his attempts to return various pieces of medieval torture left behind in the basement of the vice president’s residence and marked in handwritten script: “property of the Smithsonian” were refused by that institution.
“Those most definitely aren’t ours,” a curator of the Smithsonian wrote back to Biden.