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.)

Today ReddHedd does some serious reporting on the never-discussed reality that Dick Cheney is the man behind the curtain.

There has been an undertone in every article coming out of DC on this shooting that really needs more discussion: just how much control, if any, does the President have over this Vice President?

According to the Newsweek article, the only way the White House got the skinny on what happened in Texas was when Rove called his long-time pal Katherine Armstrong late the night of the shooting. (Although the Veep did, apparently speak with David Addington, his Number 2, the President was relegated to the Junior Soprano nominally in charge role for the evening and not called at all.)...

Was this the Veep thumbing his nose at the WH -- or did he just not think that they would even care about the details? What kind of President doesn't even find out if his VP was shot or not until the next morning?

What kind of President? The kind of President who isn't really President but just plays one on TV, that's what kind.

George Bush is a sock puppet. Even though he knew he had no qualifications or skill to be President, he let Karl Rove put his hat in the ring on one condition - that he wouldn't have to make any decisions. That job would fall to the Vice President - and that's why Dick Cheney picked himself.

ReddHedd misses the obvious picture, preferring to go psychological:

Hello?!? That's just plain crazy. And what sort of Veep withholds that sort of information from the President? These people aren't on the same team -- either that, or there is some sort of weird, detached, passive aggressive thing going on that I don't even want to know. Maybe someone with more of a psych background can explain this to me, but this whole miscommunication narrative is bizarre.

There is nothing psychological about it - it's strictly political. Bush and Cheney cut a deal from the outset, and the terms of the deal have never changed. Cheney would make all policy decisions, and Bush would go before the cameras to sell them. It's a strict division of labor that worked pretty well - until Cheney turned the cameras onto himself by drunkenly shooting an old man in the face.

ReddHedd then seques to one of my favorite topics: Cheney's order to shoot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania on 9/11. Here's how it was first reported 4.5 months later by the Washington Post:

9:55 am: Once airborne, Bush spoke again to Cheney, who said the combat air patrol needed rules of engagement if pilots encountered an aircraft that might be under the control of hijackers. Cheney recommended that Bush authorize the military to shoot down any such civilian airliners - as momentous a decision as the president was asked to make in those first hours. "I said, 'You bet,'" Bush recalled. "We had a little discussion, but not much."

That was the conversation Bush was having when this famous photo was taken - the one the GOP sold for $150. I thought it was pretty gruesome that the GOP would sell a photo of that conversation for campaign cash - and I still do.

But according to Newsweek's account of the 9/11 Commission, "none of the staffers who worked on this aspect of the investigation believed Cheney's version of events." They think Cheney never even bothered to ask Bush!

A draft of the report conveyed their skepticism. But when top White House officials, including chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, reviewed the draft, they became extremely agitated. After a prolonged battle, the report was toned down. The factual narrative, closely read, offers no evidence that Cheney sought initial authorization from the president. The point is not a small one. Legally, Cheney was required to get permission from his commander in chief, who was traveling (but reachable) at the time. If the public ever found out that Cheney gave the order on his own, it would have strongly fed the view that he was the real power behind the throne.

Folks, this is a real scandal - both political and journalistic. The political scandal is whether Cheney issued the order without consulting Bush.

The journalistic scandal is how long have Evan Thomas and Newsweek (and its parent company, the Washington Post) known that the 9/11 Commission staff thinks Cheney alone ordered the shoot-down of Flight 93?

And finally there is the scandal of the shoot-down itself: was Cheney's shoot-down order actually carried out? Here is the conclusion I wrote on 6/21/02:

All available evidence points to one conclusion: that an F-16 shot down Flight 93 on orders from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But the Pentagon denies this, and the FBI refuses to publish a final report.

The credibility of both the Pentagon and the FBI are in shreds. The Pentagon officially revealed itself to be in the lying business when it quietly announced its Office of Strategic Initiatives; although the office was repudiated after a media firestorm, few Americans doubt the Pentagon is still secretly lying when it feels a need to do so. The FBI, on the other hand, has been exposed as grossly incompetent, both in failing to heed numerous pre-9-11 warnings from its own agents, and in failing to find the Anthrax terrorist after more than 8 months.

If the Bush administration truly believed Flight 93 crashed without being shot down, it could release a wide range of credible evidence to prove its case:

• Disclosure of the collected debris, with a full debris map     
• Disclosure of both the voice and data flight recorders     
• Radar reports from ground radar and AWACS        
• Interviews with the fighter jet pilots who were scrambled on 9-11, as well as their commanders        
• Interviews with air traffic controllers

But the Bush administration adamantly refuses to disclose any information about its conduct on 9-11.

So the mystery remains: does the famous $150 photo show Bush ordering the shootdown of Flight 93?

The truth is out there, but Congress and the media will have to ask some very tough - and unspinnable - questions to find it.