Harold Meyerson has a great op-ed piece in today's Washington Post:

Hey, you! The snarl in the suit! Yeah, you, Dick Cheney: Go **** yourself!

Phew! I feel better already, and I used only asterisks. Our vice president gets a rush when he goes in for the stronger stuff, the kind of words to which we columnists would never expose our thoughtful readers. But we have it from Cheney himself that after he encountered Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy on the Senate floor and told him what to do, he "felt better afterwards."

If that justification came from the mouth of a Democrat, of course, it would be a sign of moral laxity and lack of seriousness. How many conservatives have told us that Bill Clinton was a feel-good guy devoid of all discipline? And how many have chastised Dick Cheney for invoking the justification they constantly accused Clinton of succumbing to?

Besides, this isn't the sole instance of Cheney justifying himself in the manner of Clinton in his recent "60 Minutes" interview. When Dan Rather asked Clinton why he had involved himself with Monica Lewinsky, the former president allowed as how he did it "because I could" -- a justification he acknowledged as the worst imaginable.

Consider now Cheney's case for last year's dividend tax cut, a budget-busting giveaway to the rich that came on top of the administration's previous budget-busting giveaways to the rich. In his memoir, Paul O'Neill -- the longtime Cheney buddy whom the veep had recruited to be Treasury secretary -- recounted his attempt to convince Cheney that yet another tax cut would spell fiscal ruination. "We won the [2002] midterms," Cheney responded. "This is our due."

The answer gives a whole new meaning to the term "entitlement program," but then, so does the Bush presidency.