Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency begins today in the Washington Post. I'll be making comments on this series as I have the opportunity to study it more carefully, but it looks to be very interesting. Cheney is truly unique in the annals of the U.S. presidency; no other VP has exerted the influence over the president and the power over the executive branch as he has. No vice president has been so secretive and gotten away with it.

Remember one caviat: Over the past six years the Washington Post has printed most of its political ink in support of the Bush Administration, including some of its most idiotic and counterproductive policies. The really important information to be conveyed by these articles will be the information that is left out.

We wrote in 2000:

Jungian psychology often refers to the "shadow," meaning that part of the personality that is rejected and repressed but which still exists and exerts a deep influence upon the conscious ego. Likewise, organizations may be usefully imagined as casting a corporate shadow--institutional issues and facts that by tacit agreement don't exist in the corporate consciousness. It's easy to ascertain the shadow of your own organization; make a list of issues, events and things that cannot be mentioned, let alone discussed. Often these unmentionables are extremely important to the life of the organization, and ignoring them can spell institutional disaster, either from within or without. Nevertheless, the organization achieves a stable identity, a corporate ego, by denying and refusing to consider issues, events and things that threaten the corporate identity. Like the human ego, the corporate ego perceives the raising of those issues as a threat to its very existence and reacts in ways that from the outside often seem irrational and self-destructive. What is being preserved is not the organization but its ego, which has identified itself with the whole organization.

Like corporations, like governments.