Cheney and executive power

I woke up this morning and began to read part two of the Washington Post series on the vice president and it made me want to play a game: If, as has been posited, Alberto Gonzales is the "Fredo" of the administration, then which Godfather character is George Bush and, perhaps more interestingly, which is Dick Cheney? For the life of me I couldn't come up with a good match for either of them. Though he's actually the elder brother, George Bush is basically a second "Fredo" (minus the part where Fredo gets skipped over to be the Don) while Cheney is sort of equal parts Sonny and Tom Hagen, but with maybe the least beneficent features of each--lacking any of Sonny's familial passion or Hagen's moderation, he exhibits Sonny's temper and Hagen's shadowiness. And there the similarities end.

Needless to say, I wasn't exactly thrilled about the weakness of the metaphor. But then I had an important realization and have been at peace ever since. And that is that whereas the Corleone family was basically the most shrewd and competent and just of all the New York crime families, the Bush administration is... the Bush administration. So there's obviously little reason to think there'd be any great analogies here.