There He Goes Again

Soxblog tosses up a rumor, courtesy of the Weekly Standard’s Bill Krystol, that George W. Bush will dump Dick Cheney in favor of John McCain. I have but one word to offer:

Hooey.

Okay, a few more words: After blatantly campaigning for press secretary in a presumed McCain Administration during the ’00 primaries, Bill Krystol has been floating this and similar trial balloons for years, hoping against hope that it’ll go over with the Bushies, and that he, Krystol the Younger, might ascend with McCain back into the White House firmament.

He might as well hang it up. Bush and McCain don’t trust or even particularly like each other, even though they do agree on a few–but certainly not all–key policies. There’s no chance (and no reason, at this point) for Dubya to dump somebody he trusts implicitly for a wild-card like McCain. If there were to be a replacement for Cheney (not gonna happen), that individual would almost certainly come from within Bush’s inner circle–which definitely does not include John McCain.

If it comes to that, nobody in the Bush White House is likely to give much creedence to Krystol in the first place. There’s an old animus between Bush and Krystol, going back to Dubya’s advising his father to dump Dan Quayle in 1992; Krystol was then Quayle’s chief of staff.