"Only Nixon could go to China," and only ex-Republican ex-Senator Lincoln Chafee can explain how George W. Bush set out "to preempt the Congress... on every issue", "turned his back on (his) bedrock campaign pledges", and become simultaneously America's most powerful and least popular President (and why there could never be a "surely this..." moment). NOT just another OMGBUSH commentary, this should be required reading for anybody who honestly wants to know what went wrong.
posted on May 2, 2008 - View this thread

Tough talk about impeachment. A public opinion poll from the American Research Group recently reported that more than four in ten Americans — 45% — favor impeachment hearings for President Bush and more than half — 54% — favored impeachment for Vice President Cheney. In the video segment linked to here (available via javascript pop-up window from the main linked page), Bill Moyers gets perspective on the role of impeachment in American political life from Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who wrote the first article of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, and THE NATION's John Nichols, author of THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT. Transcript is available here.
posted on Jul 16, 2007 - View this thread

'A Different Understanding With the President' The first of four chapters in this week's Washington Post on how Dick Cheney became the most influential and powerful man ever to hold the office of vice president. This series examines Cheney's largely hidden and little-understood role in crafting policies for the War on Terror, the economy and the environment. By Barton Gellman and Jo Becker.
posted on Jun 24, 2007 - View this thread

Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda Discounted. A newly declassified report (PDF) by the Pentagon's inspector general claims that Iraq was not working with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion and that the intelligence was manipulated by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. On the same day as the report came out, Dick Cheney claimed that they did have a relationship via Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi may be dead, but he's still useful. [Via TalkLeft.]
posted on Apr 6, 2007 - View this thread

Politics/PlameFilter: In opening arguments today in the Plame investigation perjury case against Vice President Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby, the prosecutor portrayed Libby as an agent of a Cheney-driven media offensive. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the day came from Libby's attorney, who portrayed his client as a White House-chosen scapegoat for Karl Rove's misdeeds. A conservative reporter saw in Libby's emerging defense a "dramatic split inside the Bush White House." An MSNBC host asked whether this hullabaloo could lead to Cheney's resignation. Background on the case. Liveblogging of today's arguments from an anti-administration perspective.
posted on Jan 23, 2007 - View this thread

Cheney's Cheney and the Unitary Executive Theory. An excellent article from the New Yorker on the mysterious forces at work behind the Bush administration's expansion of executive powers.
posted on Jul 7, 2006 - View this thread

Intrigues at the White House: Andrew Card, Bush's longtime chief of staff -- the guy who briefly interrupted the President's reading of The Pet Goat one rough morning in 2001 and took heat for the Katrina and Dubai debacles -- is out, replaced by budget director "Yosh" Bolten, the one-time founder of a club called "Bikers for Bush." Meanwhile, is Rove rolling over for Patrick Fitzgerald, and if so, what's the angle?
posted on Mar 28, 2006 - View this thread

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald says emails relevant to the Valerie Plame leak investigation have gone missing from the White House. "In an adundance of caution," Fitzgerald wrote [PDF] to "Scooter" Libby's lawyers on January 23, "we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." Might this help explain why Alberto Gonzales -- now the Attorney General, and lately so busy mustering arguments to assert that Bush's NSA domestic-spying program is "legal" -- waited 12 hours before instructing White House staff to preserve documents relevant to the leak investigation after telling Andrew Card about it? Shades of the late, great yoga instructor, Rose Mary Woods. [More on Plame here.]
posted on Feb 1, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Nov 4, 2005 - View this thread

The family trees of American politicians - There are those with very long blue blood pedigrees, and there are those with very short and unknown pedigrees. There are also some surprises, like a certain Democratic senator and possible '08 Veep pick being somewhat closely related to the current Veep, or that certain ex-mayors have family trees that were apparently a bit inbred back in the old country. Other fun tidbits: Newt Gingrich's father was illegitimate, John Kerry is related to the rabbi who created the Golem of Prague, Pat Buchanan is related to both FDR and Marilyn Manson, Wesley Clark's father was a Kohan, Martin Luther King was born Michael Louis King, and Gary Hart was born Gary Hartpence, which was in turn derived from an ancestor named James Eberhart Pence. (more non-politicians here)
posted on Oct 3, 2005 - View this thread

Diagnosis via press release. Josh Marshall speculates on Dick Cheney's health based on a press release put out by a shoe store. The store says Cheney's feet have "changed to a size 10EEE". Swelling of the feet is a primary symptom of congestive heart failure.
posted on Dec 2, 2004 - View this thread

Truly meta. We've had posts about outing gay politicians. We had a post about Dick Cheney's gay daughter. We had a Metatalk post about revealing blogs that the author might want to keep private.

Now they're all tied togther in the story of a politician's possibly gay daughter being outed by a blog that she might or might not have been keeping private. My head hurts.
posted on Sep 27, 2004 - View this thread

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 on Jul 31, 2004 - View this thread

"You've admitted what you are Fat Tony, now you're just haggling over the price." Thanks for the Churchill whore meme to RogerAiles, who flagged this comment by Justice Scalia: "If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined." So, what is the going rate?
posted on Mar 20, 2004 - View this thread

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 on Feb 24, 2004 - View this thread

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 on Feb 6, 2004 - View this thread

Mary Cheney: "The next time you walk into a gay public place, be prepared for a chorus calling you everything from a quisling and a betrayer to a selfish, fiendish, nasty example of a human being." Michelangelo Signorile's open letter to the VP's gay daughter.
posted on Jan 27, 2004 - View this thread

Astroturfing gone bad. Why aren't newspaper editors fighting this? They've seen it before. Its one thing to offer a press release and another to ask visitors of the Bush-Cheney website to mail their newspapers the same form letter.
posted on Dec 29, 2003 - View this thread

the second most powerful man in the world , is the world a more or less safe place with this man (some would argue) in charge?
posted on Nov 9, 2003 - View this thread

many of haliburtons subsidiaries pay no taxes as they are ensconsed in offshore tax havens. the vice president is collecting substantial sums in deferred payments, and sizable government contracts are being awared to this company without competition. should we ask our vice-president to encourage his former employer to pay corporate taxes like the most of the rest of americans and american businesses, considering the hefty sums of money being handed them by the american tax payer?
posted on Apr 14, 2003 - View this thread

It's fun to watch your tax dollars put politicians in office. "Cheney has been the White House road warrior this year, hauling in more than $22 million for Republicans in 74 campaign appearances"
posted on Oct 23, 2002 - View this thread

Erudite op-ed piece on current events by Mark Morford of SF Gate. Pro-America does not mean pro-war. Or pro-Bush. Or anti-Afghanistan. Or pro-little-flags-on-SUV-antennas. [via BR]
posted on Nov 5, 2001 - View this thread

Have You Seen This Man? Where is the Vice President of the United States? In the past, the VP was largely a non-actor; waiting in the wings for something bad to happen. However VP RC has hardly been that to President Bush. Is he "hiding," purely for security reasons, or is something else going on?
posted on Oct 18, 2001 - View this thread

News You Can Use! IsDickCheneyDeadYet.com has more than three dedicated staffers who surreptitiously check the Veep’s vitals every five minutes, round the clock, 24 hours a day. Just so you can rest a little easier. Check back often and "Be the first to know, when Cheney goes..."
posted on Jul 12, 2001 - View this thread

Bum Ticker. Dick "Big Time" Cheney may need a pacemaker. No big deal, or should he step down?
posted on Jun 29, 2001 - View this thread

I still can't get over the fact that the U.S. President and Vice President have been arrested five times between them. For those keeping score, that's 2 DUIs for Cheney and one for Bush, and two disorderly conducts for Bush. I know, I know, many other presidents have committed far greater crimes, these were mistakes of youth, etc. etc. But five arrests between them? Sigh.
posted on May 17, 2001 - View this thread

We haven't had a Salon link on the front page for a while, so I don't feel bad about posting this one. Conserve energy the Dick Cheney way! [Warning: left-wing, liberal, tree-hugging, granola-eating, pinko, partisan parody. You don't have to click if you don't like such stuff.]
posted on May 10, 2001 - View this thread

Cheney casts his first tie breaking vote in the Senate.
posted on Apr 3, 2001 - View this thread

Haven't web been here before? Why does Lynne Cheney now sound so much like a previous Vice-President's wife seven years ago?
posted on Feb 21, 2001 - View this thread

The first step in setting up a parallel government? "Republican vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney said if the General Services Administration will not assist George W. Bush's transition to the White House, the campaign is prepared to go ahead on its own. 'We will proceed drawing on other sources,' Cheney told reporters in Washington on Monday." Yeah, I just bet they will.
posted on Nov 27, 2000 - View this thread

I haven't seen a real election-related post in a couple of days, although we were talking about religion. Thus...

The ADL asks Joe Lieberman to shut up already. Funny how nobody's mentioned that to Dick. I guess the rules are different for war profiteers.
posted on Aug 29, 2000 - View this thread

The Rock and Dick Cheney team up to layeth the smacketh down on Al Gore's candy ass!
posted on Jul 31, 2000 - View this thread