Gerald Ford's administration was in trouble. Tension within the party and turf battles in the Cabinet were tearing it apart. Something had to be done to get things back on course in time to fend off Ronald Reagan's primary challenge. And Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were just the men to
do it.
posted by Chrysostom
on Oct 31, 2012 -
37 comments
The man who knew too much. "He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to have his day in court."
posted by homunculus
on Oct 13, 2007 -
21 comments
Same Old Dogs, Same Old Tricks. In a
rare act of bipartisan cooperation, the House of Representatives passed a group of bills strengthening the FOIA (
HR 1309), streamlining access to Presidential Libraries (
HR 1255), and expanding safeguards for whistleblowers (
still in process, HR 985), with those that were passed having a veto-proof margin. The
White House sharply criticized these acts of transparency as unconstitutional, a threat on the established separation of Powers, and as a threat to national security [
pdf]. All of which heralds back to an earlier time, that
looks vaguely familiar...
posted by rzklkng
on Mar 15, 2007 -
23 comments
Tell, but don't ask. Dick's lesbian daughter is pregnant. Mary Cheney and her partner Heather Poe are having a baby. But she'd rather not talk about it. The future grandparents think any mention of their daughter's sexual preference is
out of line. Dan Savage thinks
otherwise.
posted by Toekneesan
on Feb 3, 2007 -
60 comments
The coverup is always bigger than the crime. No matter what your political leanings, the Scooter Libby
obstruction of justice trial has something for everyone, including
testimony by memory experts, an
all-star witness lineup, including the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of State,
phone calls to the press from the bowels of Air Force Two, the
first high-profile Federal court proceeding where bloggers have been given press credentials, some
interesting Voir Dire questioning of potential jurors [
pdf ] - and
the interesting responses thereof, a
book largely culled from research done by the Citizen Press, an unpopular war, an unpopular president, and an even more unpopular Vice-President,
full-frontal assaults on the credibility of the press, scrubbed newspaper archives, at least
one witness (a former White House Official?) who has been granted immunity, an
earlier leak of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq regarding WMD, and quite possibly substantial insight into the who, what, when, and where of the selling of the Invasion of Iraq.
posted by rzklkng
on Jan 17, 2007 -
28 comments
Cheyney the Torturer? According to
Dan Froomkin today, Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff to the secretary of state) said that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office.
posted by shiska
on Nov 4, 2005 -
52 comments
Dick Cheney, Dressing Down I can't decide if this is interesting cultural criticism or ridiculous nitpicking about something that isn't very important. Maybe it's both. Side note: It's a nice change to read about a male politician's appearance and wardrobe for once.
posted by scratch
on Jan 28, 2005 -
117 comments
Overexposed: Upon closer inspection, it seems the vice president’s smile was not his biggest, ahem, asset. Is that what we think it is?
posted by dogmatic
on Nov 12, 2004 -
57 comments
Vice President Cheney declares the no-wmd report
justifies war. So what exactly were they going to do to us that was dangerous, think about the act? In related news, widespread genocide is a potential thought of an
african government, let's get em?
posted by omidius
on Oct 7, 2004 -
98 comments
Cheney disclosed. Rolling Stone's profile of our ambitious vice-president and the team he assembled to keep himself in power: "'They were like cancer cells,' says retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski,
who worked on the Defense Department's Near East and South Asia desk
during the buildup to the Iraq war. 'They didn't care about the truth.
They had an agenda. I'd never seen anything like it. They deformed
everything.'" [Did you know that "dancing revolution"
blogeur John Barlow was a former Cheney campaign worker? I sure didn't.]
posted by digaman
on Sep 6, 2004 -
21 comments
Hating Dick Cheney - Our vice president is so widely hated as being an
evil puppeteer, but this seems to be far from the truth. He's really "a frazzled, heart attack survivor who's barely hanging on—to life, his job, his position, his sense of self-esteem."
posted by MrAnonymous
on Aug 13, 2004 -
52 comments
Bush camp solicits race of Star staffer. President Bush's re-election campaign insisted on knowing the race of an Arizona Daily Star journalist assigned to photograph Vice President Dick Cheney.
The jounalist's name was Mamta Popat. She sure
sounds like a terrorist.
posted by JeffK
on Jul 31, 2004 -
30 comments
Most of the rhymes kicked therein cannot be quoted in a family publication, but observers gave Mr. Cheney credit for his deceptively laid-back flow. Mr. Leahy was applauded for managing to rhyme the phrases "unethical for certain," "crude oil spurtin'," and "like Halliburton."
posted by xmutex
on Jul 20, 2004 -
15 comments
Halliburton's business dealings in Iran: Waxman’s and Thompson’s complaints revolve around a Halliburton subsidiary called Halliburton Products and Services, which is based in Dubai and registered in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven in the Caribbean. As the Financial Times first reported, the subsidiary opened an office in Tehran in February 2000, when Cheney was still CEO of Halliburton. The subsidiary has sold $40 million worth of oil services in Iran.
Thompson, who is acting on behalf of the city’s pension funds, has asked Halliburton for clarifications about its business dealings in Iran, a country listed by the American government as a sponsor of terrorism and thus subject to stringent U.S. trade sanctions. Thompson claims that Halliburton has been using its subsidiary to circumvent a 1995 executive order barring American companies from doing business with Tehran.
posted by hoder
on Jul 7, 2004 -
5 comments
In heartland, Cheney touts "conservative values" and therapeutic use of "F-word" After his
controversial, widely and
inconsistently reported use of the "F-word" - recently declared to be
"abhorrent" by FCC head Michael Powell (as uttered by Bono) - Dick Cheney's
"no regrets", "felt better after I had done it" justification suggests that the
"if it feels good, do it" ethic of the 60's counterculture has now spread to the conservative mainstream. Some see a
role reversal, as a confused type of postmodernist,
relativistic thinking gnaws into the conservative zeitgeist. Seventy year old Florence Orris, at a Parma, Ohio Cheney/Republican rally, sympathized with Cheney's "F-word" catharsis, and with relativist values : "I'm almost getting to that point with my Democratic friends..." (from main link) "Conservatism, as I understand it, has always had as its end the cultivation of virtue in the individual and the community," writes one conservative who asks - is it reasonable to look towards the state, and to potty mouthed politicians, for the
promotion of public values? Laments one observer of the "Culture Wars", "Who is behind the effort to
undermine our moral standards and enslave our people?"
posted by troutfishing
on Jul 4, 2004 -
36 comments
The Paper Trail "But TIME has obtained an internal Pentagon e-mail sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official—whose name was blacked out by the Pentagon—that raises questions about Cheney's arm's-length policy toward his old employer. Dated March 5, 2003, the e-mail says "action" on a multibillion-dollar Halliburton contract was "coordinated" with Cheney's office. The e-mail says Douglas Feith, a high-ranking Pentagon hawk, got the "authority to execute RIO," or Restore Iraqi Oil, from his boss, who is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. RIO is one of several large contracts the U.S. awarded to Halliburton last year"
posted by Postroad
on May 31, 2004 -
28 comments
Dear Mary, your father, recently said he would support adding anti-gay prejudice to the US Constitution, making you and millions of other Americans second-class citizens. As an open lesbian who has worked for years as a public advocate for gay civil rights, you are in a unique position to defend yourself and your community in this dire hour.
You're right, this is very personal.
posted by alms
on Feb 24, 2004 -
12 comments
Scalia Was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia traveled as an official guest of Vice President Dick Cheney on a small government jet that served as Air Force Two when the pair came here last month to hunt ducks.
The revelation cast further doubts about whether Scalia can be an impartial judge in Cheney's upcoming case before the Supreme Court, legal ethics experts said. The hunting trip took place just weeks after the high court agreed to take up Cheney's bid to keep secret the details of his energy policy task force.
posted by GernBlandston
on Feb 6, 2004 -
41 comments
VP would back ban on gay marriage Best guess: Bush won't try for an amendment so as not to lose potential votes for his party. But this does say something about the man next in line--if not already first--for the presidency.
posted by Postroad
on Jan 10, 2004 -
36 comments
The Humane Society of the United States rips Dick Cheney on
"canned hunting": "This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures
planted right in front of them as animated targets." According to
another news source, "five-hundred pheasants were released in front of Cheney and his men; and the ten-man hunting party killed 417 of the birds. Vice President Cheney alone shot over 70 pheasants. The birds were then plucked and vacuum-packed in time for Cheney's afternoon flight back to Washington, DC."
posted by fold_and_mutilate
on Dec 10, 2003 -
76 comments
My vote for
best sentence of the year: "I did not have financial relations with Halliburton." Though I would have preferred the wording "that company" to Halliburton.
posted by coolgeek
on Sep 19, 2003 -
26 comments
Watchdog's Bark Judicial Watch, the group that's been suing for access to Cheney's Energy Task Force notes, finally gets some docs, and guess what? Way back in 2001, Cheney, et al, were looking at maps of Iraqi oil fields. Is this the bookend clue, that coupled with Rumsfields 9/12 comments about going after Iraq, starts to shed real light on the administrations foreign policy objectives?
posted by tellmenow
on Jul 18, 2003 -
36 comments
Payback? How did Bush officials get back at Ambassador Joseph Wilson for
talking publicly two weeks ago about his trip to Niger to investigate claims of an Iraqi uranium deal? By
outing his wife as an undercover CIA operative. As David Corn of The Nation says,
"...the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it..... a pair of top Bush officials told a reporter the name of a CIA operative who apparently has worked under what's known as 'nonofficial cover' and who has had the dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material. If Wilson's wife is such a person--and the CIA is unlikely to have many employees like her--her career has been destroyed by the Bush administration." The exposure of an undercover CIA agent is in fact a federal crime.
posted by Artifice_Eternity
on Jul 17, 2003 -
159 comments
Remember everyone tomorrow, April 1st, is Make Fun of Dick and Lynne Cheney day, (because
Neal Pollack said so). If you run any kind of website or publication and have the power to mock, belittle or poke fun at the second family, it's your patriotic duty to do so.
posted by alan
on Mar 31, 2003 -
18 comments
How does one assure global stability in a world where there is only one strong power? John Perry Barlow (previously mentioned
here) thinks Dick Cheney has
the answer.
posted by ashbury
on Feb 26, 2003 -
54 comments
US wrecks cheap drugs deal Many of us have sorely miss VP Dick Cheney. Here is what he has been up to of late. Gosh, we will sure try to help the sick and the dying. Just not for the forseeable future. See Dick act. See Dick block help. See Dick help lobbies.
posted by Postroad
on Dec 21, 2002 -
105 comments
