Apt Analogies

From the "Vanity Fair" Oral History of the Bush White House:

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: Cheney brings this accumulation of power and ability to influence the bureaucracy to a fine art. He surpasses Kissinger even. This is all the more ironic because Cheney was the antithesis of this when he was chief of staff of the White House under Gerald Ford and when he was secretary of defense. He was very deferential. He was not trying to insinuate himself.

But he turns everything on its head and he becomes the power. And he does it through his network. This is a guy who’s an absolute genius at bureaucracy and an absolute genius at not displaying his genius at bureaucracy. He’s always quiet.

So are most of his minions, not all of them. [David] Addington [the vice president’s counsel] is brilliant, and Addington is a strange beast, and Addington is sort of the Ayman al-Zawahiri for Cheney, the brains trust. [Chief of Staff Lewis] Libby was the doer. Libby was a real bureaucrat’s dream.

Do you have any problem with Wilkerson comparing Addington to Ayman al-Zawahiri -- "brains trust" [sic] of arch-terrorist and Public Enemy Number One Osama bin Laden? Do you take any issue with Wilkerson comparing Cheney (by implication) to bin Laden himself? Continuing the analogy, I guess this makes little Scooter Cheney's Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.