There’s been a lot of comment in the last 48 hours about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s appearance on Face The Nation, and it was probably a matter of time before he was dubbed “the new Nixon” by someone.
That someone turned out to be Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, famed around the world as the former husband of Sharon Stone. A representative quote from his post yesterday on the Chronicle’s site:
This Cheney role comes just in time for those of us who were reminded by “Frost/Nixon” just how much we missed the original. As knotty as the man was himself, he could somehow make everything else seem clearer. Life without him appeared colorless, less darkly symphonic. While he was around, kicked after a defeat or voted in by a landslide, he provided psychological hand-holds in a post-1950s world where there was always mysterious and dangerous trouble lurking somewhere. He gave a face to your fears, whether you feared him or worried about the things he feared.
Later in the column, Bronstein speaks of the “philharmonic complexity” of the President’s character, which led me to refer to RN’s favorite late-night music in the title of my post. The comments to his post are also worth reading; a surprising number (since this is a Bay Area newspaper) are favorable toward RN, including one that gives him credit for ending the Cold War.