Dick Cheney’s reputation as an evil genius is overrated. He isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and his dangerous disregard for American and international law isn’t so much malicious as it is blind to the awful consequences of lashing about with naked power.

As a brilliant series in the Washington Post makes clear, Cheney is a school-yard bully for the complicated 21st century. Determined to win every fight regardless of the cost to others, this vice president steeped in the arcane back-channels of the federal bureaucracy knows precisely what political buttons to push to get his way.

This sneaky stiletto-in-the-ribs reflex was played out on a secret battleground in southwest Oregon’s Klamath watershed in 2001. With his and George Bush’s Supreme Court-ordered election victory fresh in his mind, Cheney reached down from Mount Olympus to direct minor federal functionaries as they weighed how to protect endangered salmon.

Putting the interests of hard-core Republican ranchers above all else – a well-practiced routine from his days as congressman for the Cowboy State – Cheney personally called the U.S. Interior Department’s 19th-ranking official to make certain ranchers won their water war.

What resulted was the biggest salmon die-off in the modern history of the West, an ecological disaster that eventually resulted in severe fishing restrictions for thousands of square miles of the Pacific Ocean – an economic disaster for many fishing families.

Though the Klamath travesty was a remarkable enough abuse of power to form the top paragraphs of one of the Post’s exposés, it is far from Cheney’s most flagrant or important intervention in a campaign to flay federal environmental laws at the behest of industry.

The vice president’s shameless strategy may backfire. Although Cheney and his titular boss continue to take every opportunity to press their case for unbridled presidential power, it promises to be one of the great ironies of the Bush administration that its biblically proportioned pride and greed for power are likely to result in far greater restraints on several presidents to come.

The American people have had more than we can stomach of Cheney and his obnoxious dark arts.