No joke. I could have swore all the backhanded compliments he's been dishing out and the fact that the two seem to hate each other now gave it away.

From Huffington Post:

"When the president made decisions that I didn't agree with, I still supported him and didn't go out and undercut him," Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. "Now we're talking about after we've left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. ... And I don't have any reason not to forthrightly express those views."

According to the author of the Post piece, Barton Gellman, who earlier wrote a book on Cheney called "Angler," the former vice president believes Bush made concessions to public sentiment, something Cheney views as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end, Gellman says.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," Gellman quoted a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming."