There’s a great piece in this week’s New Yorker about a man everyone should know about: David Addington, Dick Cheney’s right-hand man. (The piece isn’t online, unfortunately, but there’s this Q&A with the author that effectively summarizes it.) Addington is an extremist bully who thinks the President can do anything he wants in a time of war and that the two other branches of the federal government can do nothing to stop it. Worse, he essentially controls the legal aspects of the so-called “war on terror.” He was responsible for creating the so-called military commissions (which even many high-ranking military officials disagre with, and the constitutionality of which the Supreme Court will decide this week), and he has taken presidential signing statements, a dicey concept to begin with, to an unconstitutional extreme. In the 1980s, in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, he argued that rather than the Reagan Administration overstepping executive authority in the Iran-Contral scandal, Congress overstepped its authority in prosecuting people in the scandal.

Adding to his mystique, David Addington refuses to be interviewed or photographed. But one of the many people that Jane Mayer interviewed for her article did indeed refer to him as “a bully,” and another said that in meetings discussing what to do about presidential power after 9/11, he was “very insistent and very loud” and got his way.

This man is scary.

One hopes that if the next President is a Republican, he or she will be less foolish than George W. Bush and won’t allow things like this to happen, or people like this to work in the White House. I’m (rightly or wrongly) optimistic that this will be the case, that George W. Bush is just a horrific aberration in American history instead of the harbinger of a new era.