Thanks To Cheney, Our Long National Nightmare Will Never End
Watergate enraged certain people in all the wrong ways, and minor-league Nixon Administration factotums Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were among the few twisted Tories who thought it was bad that Congress wrestled control of the nation from a paranoid dictatorial police-state Executive Branch. Instead of being jailed forever, these two ended up running Ford's White House and infiltrating the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses like a particularly awful anti-constitutional virus.
The man who wrote Ford's infamous "our long national nightmare is over" speech, Robert T. Hartmann, was punished for his fence-mending ways by these unloved twin devils of the Ford Administration. Cheney launched his own secret speech-writing intelligence branch to undermine Hartmann, just like he would later launch shadow agencies against every other American political system. Our long national nightmare is still in full bloom!
Our long national nightmare -- still going strong [LA Times]