Details the myriad illegal, immoral, and unethical activities of Dick Cheney when CEO of Halliburton, his obstruction of justice, and lies to the American public since his appointment as Vice President. For information on an equally corrupt politician, see link to Tom DeLay-Corporate Whore. Be sure to visit our cavernous vault of archives.

Blogroll Me!

 


Mary Cheney's Vagina, Briefly:

The Rude Pundit
2/2/2007

Let us contemplate, for a moment, the vagina of Mary Cheney, lesbian daughter of the Vice President. Let us think about its ridges and folds, let us think about the size of her clitoris, about whether it's secretly pierced, about the things that only Mary, Heather Poe, and perhaps a few others might know. For, indeed, Mary Cheney's vagina - in fact, her genitals and reproductive organs - have become our newest site of contention in the war between reality and religious fundamentalists, between the blatant hypocrisy of the Cheney family and the people who their followers would condemn.

When Mary Cheney was asked about her pregnancy in Manhattan this week, she responded, "This is a baby. This is a blessing from God. It is not a political statement. It is not a prop to be used in a debate by people on either side of an issue. It is my child." Now, the Rude Pundit's not sure how Mary Cheney conceived, but he's pretty sure that "blessing from God" would not be high on the list, unless, of course by "God" you mean "medical science."

Indeed, we should contemplate Mary Cheney's pregnancy because so much of it is revolting to a large constituency of the Republican Party, to which Mary Cheney belongs. Since chances are Mary did not get heterosexually fucked in order to get pregnant, she had to be artificially inseminated. So that means some man, maybe someone she knows, maybe a stranger, had to masturbate into a cup or tube. Was this man given pornography to inspire his yanking it? Did he get to look at a stiff Hustler, a crispy Chicks With Dicks, a faded Man Meat Monthly in order to produce the sperm that would be used to impregnate the Vice President's daughter?

Mary Cheney's eggs, whose production was stimulated by drugs, were fertilized by this sperm in a lab dish. Then a doctor used a tube to go through Mary Cheney's cervix and implant embryos in Mary Cheney's uterus. One presumes that Heather was with Mary during this procedure, and not the aforementioned male masturbator.

How many embryos are now frozen that are from the donor sperm and Mary Cheney's eggs? What will happen to those embryos? How many potential babies will be destroyed or held in suspended animation so Mary Cheney can have a baby?

Yeah, there's lots of things that Mary Cheney's pregnancy and discussion of it are relevant to, despite Dick Cheney's pig grunts of protest to Wolf Blitzer. But God ain't one of those things, save for the political reasons of even invoking God, a line tossed out there like a deflowered virgin for the yahoo masses to endlessly ravish.

// posted by Rude One

 


Seeing the Full Cheney: America Held Hostage, Year Six

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 01/30/2007 - 8:16am. Editorials
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

January 20, 2007, marked the sixth year of America being held hostage by a rogue government.

The latest in a daily series of symbols of this betrayal is how our GIs continue to be pawns in the chess game of death being played out by Cheney and Bush – and Bush and Cheney are as suited to playing chess as Britney Spears is for singing opera.

Not long ago, as we noted in another BuzzFlash editorial, Nancy Pelosi warned that the White House was speeding up the escalation of troops (labeled for PR purposes with the Frank Luntz focus-group-tested term: "surge") in order to insulate the move from criticism. The administration claimed that sane people who opposed them were putting the troops "in harm’s way." A White House spokesperson called Pelosi’s accurate analysis "poisonous," declaring that Pelosi was questioning the motives of Bush, as if this were akin to criticizing Jesus.

Last week, Cheney -- in one of his now infamous interviews -- dared Congress to pass a resolution condemning the escalation in troops or capping funds for the war in Iraq because it would put the troops in harm’s way. The new Cheney mini-me at the Department of Defense (Gates) let slip the other day that he suddenly needs to "speed" up the increase of troops to Iraq.

Are you getting the picture here?

The GIs, the Iraqis, American citizens -– we are all pawns in a chess game played by guys who, if they lose a move, they try and swipe all of the other player’s pieces off the board, because they don’t have an inkling of how to play by the rules. All they know is thuggish force –- and believing that they’ve got bigger "ones" than the multi-pronged and ever-evolving "enemy" out of Orwell’s 1984.


This is playing by caveman rules. The winner is the person who batters anyone who doesn’t give them what they want. It’s really that simple.

The first step in America being held hostage to a rogue executive branch began with the still unexplained choice of Dick Cheney as Bush’s vice-presidential candidate. Here was a washed-up D.C. insider with a critical heart problem who played the "senior statesman" role of heading up the search committee for a Bush running-mate for the 2000 election.

Then, inexplicably, for reasons and stratagems still unknown to this day, Cheney mysteriously ended up as the announced candidate himself. It was one of the most curious moments in American presidential history. As usual, the corporate press let it pass with hardly a raised eyebrow or exploratory analysis. But it was the beginning of the erosion of democracy and a national posture of war that Cheney declared last week might last through several administrations.

We could speculate all we want on the decisive moment when Junior’s mind was manipulated into choosing Cheney -– who, if last week’s series of arrogant, defiant, and calculatedly preposterous interviews made clear anything, it is that Cheney is the behind-the-scenes president for foreign policy. One could go with the theory that Cheney played the artful royal courtier and manipulated Junior like a marionette into choosing him as VP, with the fawning words of praise and empowerment that he never heard from Bush I, his actual father.

But it really doesn’t matter how this oddest of vice-presidential "selections" occurred; at this point, it’s the utterly ruinous impact on our Constitution, democracy and our foreign relations that resulted from it that is the matter at hand.

As we noted recently on BuzzFlash, an administration that can steal an election –- as this one did in 2000 -– is emboldened to steal the whole government, and such has been the case.

Cheney’s astonishing emergence from the shadows last week in a series of defiant, arrogant interviews that evidenced a disdain for democracy, contempt for anything that doesn’t go his way, lack of concern for human life, and Nero-esque proclamations that revealed the big Nero behind Junior (who just gets to pretend he’s Nero) ... well, it was a performance of such unilateral imperial assertion that it would have left our founding patriots scurrying off with their muskets to seize back democracy from the Red Coats now ensconced in the White House.

The sensationally Royalist Cheney interviews came -– and perhaps not coincidentally -– at a time when the Libby perjury trial is revealing much more than "Scooter’s" lying to federal prosecutors. Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecutorial tour de force is providing evidence to the public that Cheney orchestrated the outing of an operative who specialized in tracking the illicit sales of Weapons of Mass Destruction (and thereby Cheney endangered the national security of the United States of America), authorized the leaking of classified information, and manipulated the corporate press as if it were a hand puppet.

Trying to figure out what is really going on in this secretive, Kremlinesque Bush-Cheney regime is often like trying to figure out what is going on in the old Soviet Politburo by seeing where leaders stood in officially released group photographs –- or whether they were in them at all.

But BuzzFlash will venture to speculate that Cheney sees a rapidly deteriorating political crisis at hand and that Junior isn’t up to "pushing back" the media and public, so Dick decided to take the crowbar out himself and start pummeling opponents of the regime. Sometimes the Godfather has to go public as the chief enforcer, because the front man isn’t up to the job. That’s what Cheney is doing.

Cheney basically told the American people last week: "F**k Off! I am the government. Live with it."

And so, in the absence of divine intervention on an assertion of sanity on Capitol Hill –- or a restoration of the American Revolutionary Militia -– he’ll have his way with us.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

 


Vice President Cheney tackles 'Darth Vader' image in Newsweek interview

RAW STORY
Published: Sunday January 28, 2007

From a Newsweek press release.

ON HAGEL’S IRAQ WAR CRITICISM: ‘Let’s say I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. But it’s very hard SOMETIMES to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved’


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ON FORMER FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES WHO HAVE CRITICIZED HIM: ‘WELL, I’M VICE PRESIDENT AND THEY’RE NOT’


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ON THE WAR IN IRAQ AND AGAINST AL QAEDA: ‘IT’S A PROBLEM THAT I THINK WILL OCCUPY OUR SUCCESSORS MAYBE FOR TWO OR THREE OR FOUR ADMINISTRATIONS TO COME’

New York-In Vice President Dick Cheney’s first print interview since the GOP lost control of Congress, he talks to Newsweek Senior White House Correspondent Richard Wolffe about Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel’s harsh criticism of the administration’s Iraq policy. “Let’s say I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. But it’s very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved,” says Cheney in Newsweek’s February 5 issue (on newsstands Monday, January 29). Responding to other comments-including criticism from Brent Scowcroft, and others who have worked with Cheney in the past-he says, “Well, I’m vice president and they’re not.”

Cheney also tells Newsweek he has no regrets about statements made before the war that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. “The comments I made were based on the best information we had. There’s no question that the struggle has gone on longer than we anticipated, especially in Baghdad … It does not, though, lead me to conclude that what we’re doing in terms of our overall effort, taking down Saddam Hussein’s regime, standing up a new democracy in Iraq, isn’t a worthy objective. I think it is. I think we have made significant progress … The conflict we’re involved in-not just Iraq, but on the broader basis against Al Qaeda, against the threat that’s represented by the extreme elements of Islam on a global basis now-is going to go on for a long time. And it’s not something that’s going to end decisively, and there’s not going to be a day when we can say, ‘There, now we have a treaty, problem solved.’ It’s a problem that I think will occupy our successors maybe for two or three or four administrations to come. It is an existential conflict.” He adds, “Obviously, there was flawed intelligence prior to the war … but we should not let the fact of past problems in that area lead us to ignore the threat we face today and in the future. It would be a huge mistake.”

Cheney doesn’t think U.S. involvement in Iraq is causing allies to worry we are too extended to respond to an Iranian threat, he tells Newsweek. “Most of the nations in that part of the world believe their security is supported, if you will, by the United States. They want us to have a major presence there. When we-as the president did, for example, recently-deploy another aircraft-carrier task force to the gulf, that sends a very strong signal to everybody in the region that the United States is here to stay, that we clearly have significant capabilities and that we are working with friends and allies as well as the international organizations to deal with the Iranian threat.” When asked about the possibility of airstrikes against Iran, he says, “We are doing what we can to try to resolve issues, such as the nuclear question, diplomatically through the United Nations. But we’ve also made it clear that we haven’t taken any options off the table.”

While discussing the recent national mourning for President Gerald Ford, Cheney’s mentor and friend, the Vice President says he does see similarities between Ford’s term and the current political turmoil in Washington, reports Newsweek. “I was delighted to see the outpouring of tributes to his leadership … and praise for the tough, tough decisions he made-in particular, for example, the pardon,” Cheney says. “I reflected back on where we’d been 30 years ago when he made those decisions and, obviously, suffered for it in the public-opinion polls and the press, and how history judged him 30 years later very, very favorably because of what he’d done. He had displayed those qualities of leadership and decisiveness, steadfastness, if you will, in the face of political opposition.” Is there a parallel to now? “There may well be,” says Cheney.

Cheney also speaks out about his “Darth Vader” image and whether he feels he gets treated fairly by the media. “By the time I leave here, it will have been over 40 years since I arrived in Washington, and I’ve been praised when I didn’t deserve it, and probably criticized when I didn’t deserve it,” he says. “And there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to spend a lot of time worrying about my image.”

 


Dick Cheney: A Creepy Metaphor Machine:

Oh, what metaphors abound for Dick Cheney's interview with Wolf "Behold the Resplendent Glory of My Silvery Stubble" Blitzer on CNN's Situation Room yesterday. Yes, the slithering tentacles of evil that manipulate the willing puppet body of the Vice President hunched him into a seat to answer questions without spewing viscous black oil from his dessicated entrails or unhinging his jaw to swallow whole the CNN host to slowly digest later in the quiet of his rotting corpse-filled underworld sanctuary. With a nice single malt and cigar.

For instance, we could compare Cheney's initial appearance and reactions to the surfacing of that frilled shark in Japan this week. Other than behind its heaving gills (for, indeed, it was dying, nay, rotting from within), the fishy beast, which has been around since prehistoric times, has no real color, existing in the netherest of nether regions in the deep ocean. Shifting eel-like in his seat, Cheney rasped to Blitzer, "The fact of the matter is, we can do more than one thing at a time and we have. We've been very successful with going after al Qaeda. They're still out there, they're still a formidable force. But they're not nearly as formidable as they once were, in terms of numbers and so forth...We have successfully defended the country for over five years against any further attack. They've tried, we know, repeatedly -- the president talked about it last night in his speech." The shark, as we know, died soon after it was captured. Cheney, though, kept going in the interview, so let's try another metaphor. Another shark metaphor.

In Australia, diver Eric Nerhus was being eaten head first by a great white shark. Imagine that for a moment - your head, shoulders, upper torso being swallowed as the shark tries to engorge the rest of you, the blinking dark and light of the mouth opening and closing, trying to saw you in bits, or at least in half for easier consumption. Yes, you know if you're diving off the coast of Australia, you're gonna get in the water with sharks. Nerhus used his only free arm (for the other one was in the shark) and jabbed the eye of the great white, which, sharks notoriously being pussies about their eyes, opened its mouth, giving him time to swim away.

So it was that Blitzer, in Cheney's office, tried to confront the Vice President, repeatedly. Attempting to pin down Cheney on the administration's role in destabilizing Iraq and plunging the region into its inevitable conflagration, Blitzer asked, "How much responsibility do you have, though -- you and the administration -- for this potential scenario?" Trying to hold Dick Cheney, though, is like trying to hold down a slug. Blitzer, wanting to avoid being swallowed whole, said that Saddam Hussein had been contained. Cheney, chewing hard, gurgled, "He was not being contained. He was not being contained, Wolf. Wolf, the entire sanctions regime had been undermined by Saddam Hussein," before dismissing Blitzer with "You can go back and argue the whole thing all over again, Wolf, but what we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do." Blitzer fought like a son of a bitch, eventually extricating himself and getting out of the water, because, as those who swim with man-eating fish beasts know, the shark always comes back to where the blood is. Or it just swims off, knowing it'll eat again soon.

Cheney stuck a shiv into Blitzer, repeatedly, if we think about the bearded one as our proto-citizen questioning the powerful. He questioned Blitzer's objectivity, he said that if Americans "don't have the stomach for the fight. That's the biggest threat," he dismissed half of America by saying that the reason Hillary Clinton wouldn't be a good President is "Because she's a Democrat," he told Congress it can go fuck itself, and, when Blitzer attempted to engage Cheney on the wackoid religious right's reaction to his muff-diver daughter's pregnancy, he became the outraged father, saying, "You're out of line with that question." By that point, though, any attempt to appear human, beyond his fleshy form, was long past worthless.

It was a disturbing twenty-minutes, filled with an unending stream of revulsion and disgust, not unlike catching your roommate masturbating to pornographic images of severe burn victims. And, at the end, we learned that Dick Cheney's contempt for Congress, the American people, and the Constitution is boundless, like the roots of depravity that tie him to the earth and feed his barely beating "heart."

Note: The Rude Pundit is thinking about another metaphor. See, in the film Pan's Labyrinth, there's a being that's called (in the credits) the Pale Man. (Suppose this oughta say "Spoiler Alert," although if you've seen a damn preview, you've seen the dude.) Bald with saggy skin, blind except for eyes that rest on a plate in front of him, the Pale Man sits still and silent at the head of a table that holds a sumptuous banquet. Our adolescent heroine, Ofelia, has been warned not to eat anything. She looks up at paintings in the large chamber and sees that the Pale Man is portrayed as skewering and eating children, as clear a warning as anything can be. Ofelia is too tempted though, and she downs two grapes. This awakens the Pale Man, who inserts the eyes into his hands and he rises, dragging his thin legs and limping towards Ofelia, who doesn't notice the Pale Man coming towards her. Who is Ofelia? Blitzer? All of us? Either way, a pissed-off Cheney thinking someone's taking his shit is not to be fucked with.

Note II: Any time she wants, the Rude Pundit will throw down with Maureen Dowd over who comes up with the coolest pop culture references to describe the political landscape. C'mon, MoDo, let's boogie.

 


BREAKING: Libby Destroyed Evidence Prior To Testifying, Cheney ‘Deeply Involved’

Under oath, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff Scooter Libby told a grand jury that he first learned that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent from conversations with the media. In fact, he first learned that information from Vice President Cheney himself.

Libby is now on trial for perjury. His defense is that he simply forgot who told him that Plame worked for the CIA. But in court today, prosecutors outlined a powerful case establishing that Libby had reason to remember who told him and motive to cover it up. MSNBC’s David Schuster said today’s revelations from prosecutors are “new and will astound a number of people, even those who have been following this case.” Among the new claims:

– “Vice President Cheney himself directed Scooter Libby to essentially go around protocol and deal with the press and handle press himself…to try to beat back the criticism of administration critic Joe Wilson.”

– Cheney personally “wrote out for Scooter Libby what Libby should say in a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.”

– “Scooter Libby destroyed a note from Vice President Cheney about their conversations and about how Vice President Cheney wanted the Wilson matter handled.”

 


Mondale: Cheney steps 'way over line'
Takes vice president to task for what he sees as bully tactics

January 20, 2007
Athens, Ga.

Vice President Dick Cheney has bullied federal agencies and given absurd advice about the nation's risk and Iraq, Walter Mondale said Friday, adding that it never would have been tolerated when Mondale was vice president.
"I think that Cheney has stepped way over the line," Mondale said at the opening of a three-day conference about former President Jimmy Carter at the University of Georgia.

Mondale, who served under Carter, said Cheney and his assistants pressured federal agencies as they prepared information for President Bush.
"I think Cheney's been at the center of cooking up farcical estimates of national risks, weapons of mass destruction and the 9/11 connection to Iraq," he said.
That does not serve the president, because he needs facts, Mondale said.

"If I had done as vice president what this vice president has done, Carter would have thrown me out of there," Mondale said. "I don't think he could have tolerated a vice president over there pressuring and pushing other agencies, ordering up different reports than they wanted to send us. I don't think he would have stood for it."

Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, had this response to Mondale's comments: "Twice elected to serve with President Bush, the vice president is committed to protecting Americans from those who wish to do us harm." She also cited a September television interview in which Cheney said he would take issue with "any suggestion we've gone beyond where we should have."
Academics credit Carter with expanding the role of the vice presidency during his administration.

As vice president, Mondale served as the president's senior adviser. He held an office in the West Wing of the White House, had private meetings with the president and spoke on behalf of the president before influential groups.

 



Deal impedes scandal leads
Secret Service sued over visitor records

By Pete Yost
Associated Press
Published January 6, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public.

Not until the fall did the Bush administration reveal the existence of the memorandum of understanding that was signed last spring. The White House is using it to deal with a legal problem on a separate front, a ruling by a federal judge ordering the production of Secret Service logs identifying visitors to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

In a federal appeals court filing three weeks ago, the administration's lawyers used the memo in a legal argument aimed at overturning the judge's ruling. The Washington Post is suing for access to the Secret Service logs.

The five-page document dated May 17 declares that all entry and exit data on White House visitors belongs to the White House as presidential records rather than to the Secret Service as agency records. Therefore, the agreement states, the material is not subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the past, Secret Service logs have revealed the comings and goings of various White House visitors, including Monica Lewinsky and Clinton campaign donor Denise Rich, the wife of fugitive financier Marc Rich, who received a pardon in the closing hours of the Clinton administration.

The memo last spring was signed by the White House and Secret Service the day after a Washington-based group asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Secret Service in a dispute over White House visitor logs for Abramoff.

The chief counsel to another Washington-based group suing to get Secret Service logs calls the memo "a political maneuver couched as a legal one."

"It appears the White House is actually manufacturing evidence to further its own agenda," Anne Weismann, a Justice Department lawyer for 19 years and now chief counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Friday.

The White House and the Secret Service declined to comment.

Last year in the Abramoff scandal, the Bush administration, in response to three lawsuits, provided an incomplete picture of how many visits Abramoff and his lobbying team made to the White House.

The task of digging out Abramoff-White House links fell to a House committee that collected the lobbyist's billing records and e-mails. The House report found 485 lobbying contacts with presidential aides over three years, including 10 with top adviser Karl Rove.

As part of its security function of protecting the White House complex, the Secret Service uses the log information to conduct background checks on people prior to daily appointments and visits.

In the mid-1990s, the conservative group Judicial Watch obtained Secret Service entry logs through a lawsuit.

Secret Service records played a significant role in congressional investigations of the Clintons when they were in the White House.