Dr. Doom himself (Dick Cheney) pushed President Bush hard to pardon Lewis Libby last month who was convicted in his role for leaking information about CIA employee Valerie Wilson. Bush stood his ground. Although, may I point I that previously Bush commuted Libby’s sentence which got him off a 30-month prison term. Apparently, Cheney wouldn’t rest until Libby was pardoned:

Dick Cheney spent his final days as vice president making a furious last-ditch effort to secure a pardon for his onetime chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., leaving him at odds with former President George W. Bush on a grave matter of personal loyalty as the two moved on to private life, according to several former officials.

The officials said Tuesday that Cheney’s lobbying campaign on Libby’s behalf was more intense than previously known. They said Bush was unyielding to the end, already frustrated by a deluge of last-minute pardon requests from other quarters.

Add that to his legacy book.

Ok, so it wasn’t said in such direct words, but there’s been a bit of indirect verbal sparring between our current Veep Dick Cheney, and our Veep to be Joe Biden.  Biden recently cut an interview discussing his thoughts on the Vice Presidential role, and the man who will hand the job over to him and… well… let’s just say they were less than flattering-

I think the recommendations, the advice that he has given to President Bush — and maybe advice the president already had decided on before he got it — I’m not making that judgment — has been not healthy for our foreign policy, not healthy for our national security, and it has not been consistent with our Constitution, in my view.

His notion of a unitary executive, meaning that, in time of war, essentially all power, you know, goes to the executive, I think is dead wrong. I think it was mistaken. I think that it caused this administration in adopting that notion to overstep its constitutional bounds, but at a minimum to weaken our standing the world and weaken our security. I stand by that, that judgment.

And he also went on to say that he still thinks we should have gone into Iraq, knowing exactly what we knew and the way we did, as I — I heard the interview. He also stands by the fact that we still should keep Guantanamo Bay open and so on. So — so we have fundamentally different view.

Nothing thus far that would change my fundamental view that Guantanamo should close, number one, that, number two, the way in which we have conducted our policy, in terms of both surveillance as well as the detainees, has hurt our reputation around the world.

And to quote from a previous national security report put out by the — the intelligence community, we have — we have created, not dissuaded, more terrorists as a consequence of this policy.

Well, ol’ Dick was not happy with this criticism, and said in an interview of his own that Biden would wise up after spending some time in his shoes.  Other tidbits include-

“He also said that all the powers and responsibilities of the executive branch are laid out in Article I of the Constitution,” Cheney said in a interview that was conducted on Friday. “Well, they’re not. Article I of the Constitution is the one on the legislative branch.”

“Joe’s been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a member of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate for 36 years, teaches constitutional law back in Delaware, and can’t keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature and which provides for the executive. So I think I’d write that off as campaign rhetoric. I don’t take it seriously.”

“If he wants to diminish the office of the vice president, that’s obviously his call,” Cheney shrugged. “President-elect Obama will decide what he wants in a vice president and apparently, from the way they’re talking about it, he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time.”

“The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States,” Cheney said. “He could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen.

“He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.”

Aaaannnnnd… we’ll end on that note, because to me, that last bit encompases everything Cheney’s stay in the White House has been about to him, and I can’t wait until someone a little less… apocalyptic takes his place.

yar!!!

Here’s a link depot in honor of “International Talk Like a Pirate Day”:

• Russia’s continuing effort to alienate themselves from the west and align themselves with Arab countries was perpetuated by yesterdays announcement of $10 million in aid to the terrorist run Palestinian Authority.
• The all important Jewish vote:  Florida Jews report “push polling” via telephone this week.
• U.S. officials announce that Al-Qaida is unpopular and imploding.  Tell that to the next suicide bomber victim.
• Who would you prefer as President?  Palin or Biden?  A make-believe poll shows the people would prefer Sarah Palin as President.
• Biden is famous for his daily commute from his home in Delaware to work in D.C. for the last 35 years.  Now that he’s a VP candidate, how’s his commute faring?
• Damning Bush Administration books are being published faster than you can say impeachment!  Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey confirms Cheney gave misleading information to win support of Iraq invasion.

Arrrrr, mateys!!!

Now I can clear out my “interesting links” folder and start again with a fresh new week!

Have a good weekend everyone.

UPDATE: 

I couldn’t help myself with this final link to TechCrunch.  Social networking sites makes a few “adjustments” for Talk Like a Pirate Day.

So here it is again, with only 6 months left as Commander in Chief President Bush and Vice President Cheney are both being reviewed by a congressional committee to decide whether or not the two men should be impeached for “a range of alleged legal and constitutional abuses”.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential candidate, introduced formal impeachment resolutions in the House of Representatives, listing numerous actions by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and appeared as a witness at Friday’s hearing:

“The decision before us is whether Congress will endorse with its silence the methods used to take us into the Iraq war. The decision before us is whether to demand accountability for one of the gravest injustices imaginable. The decision before us is whether Congress will stand up to tell future presidents that America has seen the last of these injustices, not the first,” he said.

Standing in the way of formal impeachment hearings are not only the Republican party, but also Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  There are many who argue that for the Prez to be impeached he must have committed some grave offence that represented putting himself before the citizens of the U.S. and that such a thing has not occurred.  However, others are saying that the offences committed against the Constitution itself are enough to warrant an impeachment.

As of the moment, it’s all just talk being thrown back and forth in a game of political posturing, but in an age where the past President was impeached for a blowjob that in fact affected no one but his immediate family, surely taking steps such as invasion of privacy, approving the use of torture, suspending habeas corpus, and countless other corruptions of the executive branch whether approved directly by the President, or by members of his hand-picked Cabinet, should be answered for.

If not, as former Congressman Bob Barr said, “If we don’t get a handle on this now, in some form or fashion, the next administration and the one after that, regardless of party, will take these abuses, these powers, these liberties with the fundamental institutions of our government, and take them to even higher and higher levels.”

Impeachment could become a preventative measure, to let the next governing body know that “we the people” will not allow such abuses to occur again.

Will impeachment happen?  I have to admit it’s rather unlikely, but hey… I’ve been wrong before.

Barack Obama made some remarks last Sunday highlighting his frustrations with his failure to connect with the white middle American working class- that in turn made it even harder for him to connect with the white middle American working class.  Go figure.

At issue are comments Obama made privately at a fundraiser in San Francisco last Sunday. He explained his troubles winning over working class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:

”It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The comments, posted on the Huffington Post political Web site Friday, set off a storm of criticism from Clinton, Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain and other GOP officials. It threatened to highlight an Obama weakness — the image that the Harvard-trained lawyer is arrogant and aloof.

Of course the Obama camp went into damage control mode to attempt to defuse the flare-up, and put a little more context to his words.

”I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” he said at Ball State University.

There has been a small ”political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter,” Obama said Saturday morning at a town hall-style meeting at the university. ”They are angry. They feel like they have been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they’re going through.”

”So I said, well you know, when you’re bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country.”

After acknowledging his previous remarks in California could have been better phrased, he added:

”The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That’s what sustains us. But what is absolutely true is that people don’t feel like they are being listened to.

”And so they pray and they count on each other and they count on their families. You know this in your own lives, and what we need is a government that is actually paying attention.

Of course, he still with these comments misses the fact that most of these people hold faith in these same principles and hold the same beliefs in these topics- even when the chips aren’t down.

Hillary Clinton never one to shy away from an opening to show how much she is part of whatever target audience she’s after at the time saw this as an opportunity not only to highlight her opponent’s weakness in this event, but also to show once again, how much she is “one of the people”.

”I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies,” she said. ”Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it’s a matter of personal faith.”

”I grew up in a churchgoing family …,” she continued. ”The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling’ to religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich …

”I also disagree with Senator Obama’s assertion that people in this country ‘cling to guns’ and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration,” she said.

”People don’t need a president who looks down on them,” she said. ”They need a president who stands up for them.”

Of course, Clinton’s claims to mid-western normalcy ring about as true to some as her accounts of being fired upon while travelling to Bosnia (never happened, in case anyone forgot).  And with that in mind, Vice President Dick Cheney has stepped up to the podium and issued a challenge for Hillary to meet him out in the woods and have a “hunt-off”.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Dick Cheney said that a hunting contest between him and the New York senator was “the only way” to determine whether Sen. Clinton’s tales of her gun prowess were for real.

“To be frank, Hillary Clinton’s stories about her adventures with guns don’t exactly pass the smell test,” the vice president told host Tim Russert. “If she really wants to show that she knows how to handle a rifle, there’s an easy way to do that: meet me in the woods.”

While some in the Clinton campaign expressed concern about their candidate accepting Mr. Cheney’s challenge, the idea of a hunting contest got the ringing endorsement of one member of her inner circle, former president Bill Clinton.

“Dick Cheney and Hillary in the woods with guns?” President Clinton said at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “Boy, I like the sound of that.”

But shortly after the vice president issued his challenge, Sen. Clinton seemed to back off from her earlier claims of hunting experience, saying that she had “misspoke” about her hunting exploits as a child.

“I fired a gun once, but I didn’t like it, and I didn’t recoil,” she said.

This is probably a wise challenge for her to avoid, as anyone who recalls Cheney’s hunting prowess figures this is just an excuse for him to shoot her in the face.