Today, also on CNN, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani likewise had kind words for Gingrich, arguing he's more electable than Mitt Romney in a race against Barack Obama.

“My gut tells me right now as I look at it that Gingrich might actually be the stronger candidate, because I think he can make a broader connection than Mitt Romney to those Reagan Democrats,” Giuliani told Piers Morgan. "You won't have this barrier of possible elitism that I think Obama could exploit pretty effectively."

Continue Reading...

On Monday night Burnett gave a platform to a man almost as loathed as his Wall Street buddies, former Vice President Dick Cheney. And Cheney, predictably but contemptibly, took the opportunity to bash President Obama for not authorizing "a quick airstrike" to retrieve a predator drone that was recently downed in Iran.

Cheney told Burnett:

The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. [...]

They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can’t do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that.

Continue Reading...

That's why the forum hosted Henry Kissinger, this big idea's mascot. And that's why the forum ended with an interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a memoir to promote. Cheney was joined onstage by his daughter and co-author, Liz Cheney, who is devoting herself to whitewashing her father's legacy of torture and death and shooting old men in the face.

Continue Reading...

Dick Cheney's memoir apparently mentions a lot of books he read and enjoyed. Mostly books about wars and frontier settlers and so on. Good Republican books. But the Washington Post's nonfiction book editor notes that Cheney doesn't mention reading anything while actually in office as vice president:

Continue Reading...

Cheney's memoir -- by turns implacable, misleading and frank -- presents strong evidence that he served as de facto co-president of the United States from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, until late 2006. Certainly, the book demonstrates that no vice president in American history has ever wielded such influence -- some would say control -- of the levers of power in Washington.

His radicalism is served proudly. "I wanted to make sure the governor understood my record was not moderate," he writes about an early meeting with Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

The Cheney Regency featured a canny bureaucratic mandarin waging war in tandem with a passive chief executive, who shared his views but his not skills. There is nothing comparable in the history of the American presidency. Some sympathizers have discerned the hand of God in Bush's presidency. Cheney, a less sentimental observer, gives more credit to himself.

Continue Reading...

Less than three years ago, Dick Cheney was presiding over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from a war of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law, all of which resulted in his leaving office as one of the most reviled political figures in decades. But thanks to the decision to block all legal investigations into his chronic criminality, those matters have been relegated to mere pedestrian partisan disputes, and Cheney is thus now preparing to be feted -- and further enriched -- as a Wise and Serious Statesman with the release of his memoirs this week: one in which he proudly boasts (yet again) of the very crimes for which he was immunized.  As he embarks on his massive publicity-generating media tour of interviews, Cheney faces no indictments or criminal juries, but rather reverent, rehabilitative tributes, illustrated by this, from Politico today:

Continue Reading...

Salon.com's War Room Secret Vice Presidential Correspondence Recovery Team tracked down the letter by following an elaborate series of clues Cheney placed around Washington, D.C. We reveal the contents of Cheney's secret letter of resignation below:

The Office of the Vice President
March 15, 2001

Dear Mr. President:

If you're reading this, it means one of the following things has happened:

Continue Reading...

What makes chickenhawkery such a distinctly American phenomenon is our culture's coupling of aggressive militarism with a lack of anything even resembling shared sacrifice. Quite bizarrely, we celebrate those who rhetorically promote wars as "tough" and "strong" without requiring those very warmongers to walk their talk. Shielded from any personal risk of injury or death, the chickenhawk is thus permitted to wrap himself in an American flag and goose step his way through television studios as the alleged personification of patriotic bravery.

Continue Reading...

Which makes the following nugget all the more enraging:

Politicians who supported the industry had tried for years to exempt fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the 1974 law that regulates the injection of waste and chemicals underground. The EPA's 2004 study was used to justify that effort. With the help of then-Vice President Dick Cheney -- the former head of Halliburton -- President George W. Bush's landmark energy legislation, the 2005 Energy Policy Act, included a provision that prohibited the EPA from regulating fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Regulation would be left to the states, many of which had underfunded agencies, looser standards and less manpower than the federal government.

Continue Reading...

"I worship the ground the Paul Ryan walks on," said the former vice president, Politico noted via the Houston Chronicle.

Cheney made the comment while proclaiming the need to combat the national debt. That may seem an odd sentiment to those who remember that in 2002 he reportedly told then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, "deficits don't matter."

Meanwhile, the object of Cheney's affection is, of course, the current of face of the GOP's version of deficit hawkishness -- one that Democrats hope to make a liability for Republicans in 2012. Despite a united effort by Republicans in the Senate Wednesday to rally around Ryan's proposal, a number of party members have called the proposal too extreme, perhaps fearing that backing it could carry serious electoral consequences.

Continue Reading...

Update (13:44): Yet another typo to report on, this time from CNN. Wonkette noted that CNN.com reported there was "no indication Obama tried to surrender."

Update (13:07): It is not only Fox affiliates struggling with their "Obama"s and "Osama"s. Virginia-based NBC 12 reported on "Obama's death", as this screenshot (another Twitter hit) illustrates:

Update (12:41): As far as reporting flubs go, mixing up "Obama" with "Osama" is pretty much as fatal as it can get on a day like today. Two separate Fox affiliates made this very mistake.

Fox 40, the Sacremento-based local station made the gaffe in the text scroll at the bottom of the screen which broke the news: "Obama Bin Laden dead". The below image spread across Twitter like wild fire.

Continue Reading...

Mitch McConnell, this morning: Opposing campaign finance reform was "like trying to get a deaf dog off a meat truck."

David Bossie: "There's only one man who can claim to have balanced the federal budget, and that's Newt Gingrich."

Newt Gingrich entered to "Eye of the Tiger." (I think he does this all the time, actually.) Then he compared the supposedly anti-job Obama administration unfavorably to ... the German government. You know, the one with the VAT and the high personal income taxes and the mass unionization. Gingrich then suggested replacing the EPA with the "Environmental Solutions Agency." (Maybe he thinks the "P" stands for "problems"?)

Then there was some sort of lengthy panel about Ronald Reagan. My favorite part was when a speaker began an anecdote by saying, "Ron Reagan Jr. -- don't boo ..." (Second-favorite part was when a guy said that Reagan "was even more tea party than Jefferson." He was more like the Founders than the actual Founders, themselves.)

Continue Reading...

His appearance Saturday night comes as conservatives are newly energized, after elections last year in which Republicans gained ground in Congress and in many statehouses around the county.

Cheney, who had broad influence in George W. Bush's White House, has heckled the Obama administration at many turns and has predicted President Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

The group sponsoring the event -- the conservative Young America's Foundation -- was founded to promote conservative ideas on college campuses and purchased Reagan's former ranch in 1998.

Sarah Palin addressed the group Friday.

Continue Reading...

Cheney sidestepped a chance to handicap former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's prospects, telling NBC "I'm interested in Gov. Palin. A lot of people are."

Cheney says she "has a strong following," although she has critics as well. He says he watches Palin's reality TV show about Alaska and thinks that "it's very good."

Cheney also confirms in the interview that he and President George W. Bush discussed the possibility he be dropped from Bush's ticket when Bush sought re-election in 2004, but decided against it. Cheney says he offered to step aside because some considered him the "Darth Vader" of the administration.

Continue Reading...

20 months later, Guantanamo is still open, the CIA agents accused of Bush-era torture are still free, and Obama is conducting covert air wars in at least two countries. And an ailing Cheney has now changed his tune and is actually praising Obama on foreign and national security policy.

An interview that will air tomorrow morning on NBC would have been unthinkable in 2009, when Cheney was Obama's chief antagonist. Excerpts released by NBC show a remarkable shift. Here's Cheney on Gitmo and CIA torture: 

Continue Reading...

The charges stem from a case involving as much as $180 million allegedly paid in bribes to Nigerian officials, said Femi Babafemi, a spokesman for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

Halliburton and other firms allegedly paid the bribes to win a contract to build a $6 billion liquefied natural gas plant in Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta, he said.

Terrence O'Donnell, a lawyer representing Cheney, denied the allegations.

"The Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated that joint venture extensively and found no suggestion of any impropriety by Dick Cheney in his role of CEO of Halliburton," O'Donnell's said in a statement sent to The Associated Press. "Any suggestion of misconduct on his part, made now, years later, is entirely baseless."

The Halliburton case involves its former subsidiary KBR, a major engineering and construction services firm based in Houston. In February 2009, KBR Inc. pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to authorizing and paying bribes from 1995 to 2004 for the plant contracts in Nigeria.

Continue Reading...

Bush insisted in his interview with Matt Lauer that aired Monday that Cheney was testing Bush's personal tolerance, not warning of a potential backlash by the GOP base.

Here's the passage from the book:

By the time Dick came to the ranch to deliver his final report, I had decided to make another run at him. As he finished his briefing, I said, "Dick, you are the perfect running mate." 

While I had dropped hints before, he could tell I was serious this time. Finally, he said, "I need to talk to Lynne." I took that as a promising sign. He told me that he had had three heart attacks and that he and Lynne were happy with their life in Dallas. Then he said, "Mary is gay." I could tell what he meant by the way he said it. Dick clearly loved his daughter. I felt he was gauging my tolerance. "If you have a problem with this, I'm not your man," he was essentially saying.

I smiled at him and said, "Dick, take your time. Please talk to Lynne. And I could not care less about Mary's orientation."

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

The headline news here is that Cheney apparently never apologized to Whittington, even privately. But Farhi also reveals that the contemporaneous media coverage of the event got lots of stuff flat wrong. For one thing, Whittington's injuries were quite serious. For another, he was not friends with Cheney, as was widely reported. The Post reports:

Four days after being hit, the birdshot near his heart prompted it to beat erratically, forcing him back into the intensive care unit. Doctors said Whittington suffered a mild heart attack; he thinks it was something less, a heart "event."

Still, the injuries were more dire than previously disclosed. Whittington suffered a collapsed lung. He underwent invasive exploratory surgery, as doctors probed his vital organs for signs of damage. The load from Cheney's gun came close to, but didn't damage, the carotid artery in his neck.

...

News accounts routinely described Whittington as Cheney's "old friend" and "hunting buddy." In fact, the two men barely knew each other. Before the shooting, they had met briefly only three times since the mid-1970s and had never gone hunting together before. "The most you could say is that he was an acquaintance," Whittington says.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...