As we lurch through the disasters bequeathed by W. - the economy tanking, 17,000 more troops going to Afghanistan, Chrysler pleading for a total of $9 billion - would audiences still laugh at Ferrell's lovable fool of a president?

I was wrong. The audience for the Sunday matinee of "You're Welcome America. A Final Night with George W Bush" howled in delight.

I asked Adam McKay, the former head writer of "Saturday Night Live" who directed and co-wrote the show with Ferrell, why people respond this way to one of the worst presidents ever.

"He's so clearly a neglected 13-year-old that there's something really kind of heartbreaking about him," McKay said, calling him "a good-time Charlie" who was "just used his whole life to front questionable business endeavors, and in a way that's what his presidency was.

"He doesn't have Cheney's cartoonish need for power and greed that's so off the charts you don't even understand how Cheney got that way. W. may have some awareness, deep down inside, sort of like a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows he screwed up. I think Cheney not only knows but is delighted with everything he did, as is Rumsfeld."

In the show, the former president dismisses waterboarding as a spa treatment at Bliss, and reveals that he did walk in on Cheney once in the basement of the White House locked in the amorous arms of a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams.

"He looked at me with solid silver glowing orb-like eyes, and his breath had a strong ammonia scent to it," Ferrell's W. said. "And he told me in a language that I knew in my heart hadn't been spoken in a thousand years 'Pariff Go Lanerff!' And I just ran."

One of the great mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether W. ever had an epiphany when he realized that he had been manipulated by Dick Cheney, whether it ever hit him that he had trusted the wrong father figure.

There were clues in the last couple of years that W. and Condi were trying to sidle away from Cheney by using the forbidden strategy of diplomacy in dealing with Iran and North Korea, and by cutting loose Rummy.

As one official who worked closely with both W. and Cheney told The New York Daily News' Tom DeFrank the last week of the administration: "It's been a long, long time since I've heard the president say, 'Run that by the vice president's office.' You used to hear that all the time."

The clearest sign of disaffection we have is Bush's refusal to pardon Scooter Libby, the man known as "Cheney's Cheney," despite Vice's tense and emotional pleading. It was his final, too little, too late "You are not the boss of me" spurning of Dick Cheney.

It may seem pointless for W. to worry about his legacy at this juncture, but he clearly did not want to add a Marc Rich blot to all the other gigantic blots on the copybook.

As DeFrank reported in The Daily News, Cheney conducted a full-bore, last-ditch campaign to persuade W. to pardon Libby, peppering the reluctant president with visits and phone calls, and was furious when W. would not relent.

After so many years of getting W. to do so much of what he wanted, by giving the insecure president the illusion of deference and a lack of personal ambition, it must have been infuriating to Cheney to have W. turn a deaf ear.

Cheney, uncharacteristically critical of W., told The Weekly Standard last month: "I disagree with President Bush's decision." Other Libby sympathizers put it more bluntly in the conservative magazine, calling Bush "dishonorable" and saying that his action was akin to leaving a soldier on the battlefield.

Alan Simpson, the former conservative Wyoming senator who is close to Cheney, told Jo Becker and Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times that the decision had left the former vice president "hurt and deeply disappointed," but he is not the type to stay bitter. (With Cheney contemplating writing a book, publishers and historians can only hope otherwise.)

By not pardoning Cheney's alter ego, who plied his dark arts trying to discredit Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and then lied to protect his boss, W. was clearly saying he thought that Libby, and by extension Cheney, did something wrong.

But it's not clear whether W. is simply pouting because Cheney's machinations blackened his legacy, or if, at long last, he fathoms the morality of it, that Cheney did hideous things to the Constitution - not to mention that goat devil.