Cheney has come out swinging. He denies waterboarding is torture, denies breaking any laws in using it and insists plenty of high-placed Democrats knew about it. And when he says the Obama regime is making America less safe, he says it in the short, sharp, simple way that makes for a good crawl line on cable TV news.

Even before this week, it was apparent Dick Cheney would not go gently into the not-so-good night of a former vice president.

The man whom many consider the most powerful veep in history had already been far more vocal and visible than most of his predecessors in retirement. This week in particular, the former No. 2 has been out there almost daily, doing talk shows and giving a formal address to the American Enterprise Institute on the importance of interrogation techniques widely considered to be torture.

Along the way, he is also unburdening himself of opinions on everything else, from tax policy to the fate of the GOP to the choice of a commanding general in Afghanistan. Once known for his reticence and low profile, the man from Wyoming is suddenly his party's most prominent national figure and audible voice. He is having his catharsis, and having it abundantly.

The change is less in Cheney than in the surrounding circumstances. He stands out now in large part because no one else so senior and salient in the Bush administration has come forward to defend the extreme interrogations. And Cheney has come out swinging. He denies waterboarding is torture, denies breaking any laws in using it and insists plenty of high-placed Democrats knew about it. And when he says the Obama regime is making America less safe, he says it in the short, sharp, simple way that makes for a good crawl line on cable TV news.

Once he has your attention, Cheney insists the rough stuff was used to reveal new plots like the Sept. 11 attacks, not to get suspects to provide links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. He sidesteps the complex debate about whether torture yields unique results, reinforces what other techniques reveal or produces false leads. He also elides the equally challenging problem of torture's blowback effect: How much terrorism do we engender in our future by using these tactics today?

Grasping these nettles would not be useful to the vice president's point, which is that torture (by any name) works. In pushing this idea, he relies less on evidence than on the common, intuitive notion that torturing people until they talk makes people tell you things. Otherwise, why has torture been so common through the ages?

All the expert testimony in the world has a hard time counterbalancing that inexpert and rhetorical question. For many, no evidence ever will.

But that does not speak to Cheney's own motivation in his current media blitz. To understand his current drive to change the national conversation, we have to consider multiple motives.

First, Cheney is not a hired apologist or a campaign strategist but a true believer. He sees the Obama administration's rejection of waterboarding and other harsh tactics as weakening the overall U.S. defense against another massive attack. By questioning that policy, Cheney hopes to reverse it. He is defending his own anti-terrorism policy because he still believes in it.

Second, Cheney is a political scientist and amateur historian who can see the consensus emerging all around him with regard to the Bush administration. For the moment, at least, the consensus judges harshly the decision to invade Iraq and the eagerness to subject individual terrorism suspects to waterboarding — in some cases scores of times. Cheney feels it necessary to get out there and defend what is left of the Bush-Cheney legacy, before the drumbeat of condemnation grows deafening.

Third, Cheney is exercising some of his personal First Amendment rights. He is a man of strong views, and it has been some time since he could express them freely. He endured eight years of a tight leash in a White House that listened to him (maybe too much) but thought others should not. When Cheney spoke in public in the later Bush years, it was nearly always to Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or to smaller audiences in the most loyal Republican states.

Cheney had tremendous, perhaps unprecedented influence in and around the Oval Office itself. But his public image, quite positive during his time as secretary of defense in the early 1990s, deteriorated badly. He became associated with an unpopular war, an unpopular oil industry and, of course, an unpopular Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney was largely responsible for Rumsfeld's role as secretary of defense in George W. Bush's administration, as Rumsfeld had been responsible for Cheney's rise in the Gerald Ford administration 25 years earlier.

And all that came before the hunting accident in Texas cast the shotgun-toting vice president as buffoon.

So the political side of the White House saw Cheney as a problem factor in the swing states and among the swing voters who decide national elections. The flip side is on display these days, as the Obama White House gleefully pounces on whatever Cheney says and gloats over his low personal approval ratings in polls.

Cheney knows all this. But in 2009, he no longer needs to care. If he finds himself exasperated by what he sees around him, he can jolly well answer his telephone, book himself a broadcast opportunity or two and fire back. How many other people who have lost their jobs in recent months can do the same?