Let’s Play the Blame GameBy Chris Suellentrop, The Opinionator
June 29, 2007
Don’t like Bush? Blame Reagan. It’s 40’s fault that 41 and 43 became presidents, says Michael Barone on his U.S. News blog. Barone writes:
The way we pick vice presidents is crazy. We spend lots of time and money and psychic energy on picking our presidents, with millions of people in one way or the other involved. But we let one man (or, quite possibly this time, one woman) select the vice presidential nominee. And this is considered by just about everyone as the way it should be. Yet, as [Times of London columnist Gerard] Baker points out, vice presidents have a tremendous advantage when it comes to running for president. So the decision of Ronald Reagan at something like 3 in the morning in a Detroit hotel room to pick George H.W. Bush as his running mate leads directly to Bush’s election as president in 1988 and his son’s election as president in 2000 and 2004. Had Reagan picked someone else, it is extremely unlikely that either Bush would have been president.”
Don’t like Alberto Gonzales? Blame Cheney — and more important,
“Cheney’s Cheney,” 
David Addington (photo, l.). The Washington Post recently reported that Addington was the real author of a memo that Gonzales signed and that called the Geneva Conventions “quaint.” Laura Rozen writes at her blog, War and Piece: “Without any apparent opinion or conviction on these matters that out of some circumstance ended up in his inbox, Gonzales lightly signed off on these grave issues of killing, torture and subverting the Constitution, perhaps out of no greater motivation than to please his bosses and advance his career.” 
