Editor’s Note: A longtime journalist, Margo Howard went into the family business (her mother was the fabled Ann Landers) in the 1990s as Dear Prudence. Her broad experience and understanding of human nature provide answers for the troubled — and entertainment for everyone else. Margo’s advice column, Dear Margo, appears twice a week — on Thursdays and Fridays — on wowOwow.com.

Thanks to Bob Barnett, Esq., agent extraordinaire, a whole lotta books by politicians will be coming out. As it happens, the "authors" are Republicans – perhaps because they are out of office. (Disclosure: Barnett is my friend and agent … and I’m not even a politician.) The thing is, the upcoming political memoirists are not writers. What most of them are are talkers. Really, they should talk a book, not write one, and I don’t mean on tape. This suggests a whole new art form … kind of a long Barbara Walters Special, but not necessarily with Barbara Walters. This approach would of course leave out the middle man, the writer, letting the participles dangle where they may.

Dick Cheney’s book will be out in 2011. I do not know what to make of that delay, unless he really is serious about that statute of limitations he has referred to. He says it’s the statute on keeping secrets, but I want to check if it is perhaps a statute having something to do with the World Court and The Hague. In any case, as the leaks would have it, his main point is to tell us that W "went soft" during Bush 2. That is, he wasn’t so fast to take Cheney’s advice; that he became "malleable" to public opinion. A real man, I guess, should not be responsive to the citizens that elected him. Another way to look at this, say, from Bush’s perspective, is that he caught on that Cheney’s advice was edging him toward being considered the worst president in history, and therefore began to ignore the directives, I mean, advice. I guess my idea is that instead of Cheney explaining all this to a writer, he should just go on television and tell us.

One oddity is that a book, involving a middle man, will net Cheney seven figures or, God forbid, eight. A television show, one on one – a more direct report, to be sure – would net him … zero. Another thing about a book: You can’t question the author, or perhaps point out a fiction, should there happen to be one. There’s an upside, however, to Cheney’s forthcoming book. Since he will be registering his "disappointment" with Bush, you can pretty well be sure there will be a response from W’s partisans, so we can at least look forward to a catfight at the Crawford Corral.

Then there’s Karl Rove’s book to look forward to. I suspect this will be about his sad childhood cum apologia for his actions while manipulating, I mean serving the president.

The big whoop book I suspect will be Sarah Palin’s. I hope the writer preserves some of Ms. Palin’s syntax and that there are lots of pictures. I found it interesting that her book was sold to the imprint of HarperCollins that publishes Christian literature … which is not to say that Jews and Muslims will not give it a whirl. If they’ve not selected a title yet, I would suggest The Lame Duck Lives to See Another Day.

So get out your reading glasses, kids. Before you know it we will be hearing from two people who gave us the last eight years, and a third who was awfully good looking. (And could shoot wolves from planes, to boot.) Will these books be provocative? You betcha.