Toto Award

We give "Toto Awards" to journalists who expose the man behind the curtain who really runs the White House, Dick Cheney. Today's Toto Award goes to Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect, for an editorial in the Boston Globe perfectly titled "The Cheney presidency." Kuttner describes how Cheney controls the White House operations, sometimes in concert with Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld. The question remains as to how much power sharing there is with Rove and Rumsfeld. Are they merely lieutenants, or are they in fact "co-presidents?" After all, Cheney was Rumsfeld's aide during the Ford years. Has the relationship been reversed, or not?

Ron Suskind wins a Toto Award! Here's the summary by Michiko Kakutani of Suskind's new book The One Percent Doctrine:

This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes that Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.

In the first four years of the Stolen Presidency, we gave out "Toto Awards" to brave journalists who emulated Dorothy's dog Toto by pulling back the curtain to reveal the old white man who pulled the levers to manufacture the scary image of the Wizard of Oz - just as Cheney pulls the levers to manufacture the scary image of "President" Bush. (Here is our list of Toto Award winners.)