Cheney Announces Official End To Bush Presidency




In recent days, soon to be no longer Vice President Dick Cheney has used his final round of media interviews to make sure everybody understands that all the illegal, morally questionable and controversial things George W. Bush did as president, were all decisions Bush made for himself :

“The notion that somehow I was pulling strings or making presidential-level decisions. I was not,” he said.

“There was never any question about who was in charge. It was George Bush. And that’s the way we operated. This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened.”

Which is Cheney's way of saying: "Don't look at me, I didn't do it!"

Rice Pulls Bush Back From Cheney's Clutches, Tries To Teach Him To Use Diplomacy

A very interesting story from the New York Times detailing how, over many years, Condoleezza Rice has forced her way into the middle of the Bush-Cheney boys-with-war-toys club, and in the process coerced President Bush to favour diplomacy over war. After the Afghanistan and Iraq wars obviously.

Now Rice is even pushing Bush to "sit down and talk" with his dreaded enemy one, Iranian president Mahmoud Admadinejad :

Condoleezza Rice and President Bush are often described as opposites, but their closest advisers say they are remarkably alike. Both are products of their own elites — Mr. Bush from the old East Coast establishment, Ms. Rice from Southern black professionals — who are supremely self-confident on the surface but harbor resentments underneath. Ms. Rice, like Mr. Bush, has been underestimated her entire life, as an African-American, as a woman and often as the youngest person in the room.

Ms. Rice’s unusually tight bond with Mr. Bush has helped her as secretary of state in his second term to prod the president toward diplomacy with Iran and North Korea. But administration officials have long said that her devotion to Mr. Bush made her unwilling to challenge the president when needed during his first term, when she served as a less than confident national security adviser.

More often in those years, Ms. Rice used her relationship with Mr. Bush to try to gain control over the national security process as well as two powerful men who drove much of the agenda in the first term, Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary. In January 2001, Ms. Rice went to Mr. Bush to stop Mr. Cheney from taking a major part of her job, running National Security Council meetings in the president’s absence, as Mr. Cheney had proposed to Mr. Bush that he do. “She threw a fit,” a former administration official close to Mr. Cheney recalled.

Ms. Rice, in an interview earlier this year, said that she went to the president because she was determined “to get it fixed,” and that she made the argument to him that it “wasn’t appropriate” for Mr. Cheney to run the meetings since that had not been the role of vice presidents in the past. “Mr. President, this is what national security advisers do,” Ms. Rice recalled that she told the president, who sided with her.

In August 2002, Ms. Rice went to Mr. Bush to tell him that Mr. Cheney had to be reined in after the vice president gave a speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville that effectively threatened war with Saddam Hussein and asserted that there was “false comfort” in sending United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq.

“The president said, ‘Well, why don’t you call Dick and tell him what you want him to do?’”said Ms. Rice, who said she told Mr. Cheney that his speech was going to “trap” the president because Mr. Bush was planning to call for weapons inspections. The vice president, she said, agreed to temper his next speech. Mr. Cheney had no comment on Ms. Rice’s remarks.

In September 2003, Ms. Rice went to Mr. Bush to try to wrest control of the administration’s Iraq policy from Mr. Rumsfeld and L. Paul Bremer III, then the administration’s top civilian administrator in Iraq, whose dictates from Baghdad had frustrated Ms. Rice for months.

“I explained the problem, how we were starting to get decisions out there that we would know after the fact, that had huge policy implications, and we just couldn’t work that way,” Ms. Rice said she told the president, who by October had put Ms. Rice in charge of what the White House called the Iraq Stabilization Group to manage policy during the American occupation.

In the fall of 2006, when administration officials knew that the president would dismiss Mr. Rumsfeld once he found a replacement, Ms. Rice had a hand in his ouster when she went to Mr. Bush and enthusiastically recommended Robert M. Gates, an old friend and a superior from her days on the National Security Council staff of Mr. Bush’s father.

“I told the president, ‘We have to reach out to him,’” Ms. Rice recalled. She had battled for years with Mr. Rumsfeld, whose Department of Defense, she said, withheld so much crucial war planning information from her during the period before the Iraq war that she had to send members of her staff to the Pentagon to secretly ferret out documents.

In recent months, Ms. Rice has gone so often to Mr. Bush to push him on diplomacy with Iran and North Korea that he has started to needle her that she expects him to talk to people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the radical Islamist who is president of Iran, or Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader whom Mr. Bush has said he loathes.

“You want me to sit down with Ahmadinejad?” a White House official recalled that Mr. Bush had archly asked Ms. Rice. “Kim Jong-il? Is he next?” The White House official said that Mr. Bush had also taken to calling Ms. Rice “Madame Rice,” as in “Madame Rice, you’re not coming in to tell me that we ought to change our position?”

A sit down sessions of talks between the US and Iran? It's about two decades overdue. And what a legacy for the final year of Bush's presidency. Chances of it actually becoming reality? About 0.002%

Bush On Cheney : The Man Who Pulls My Strings



A new documentary from Frontline, here, takes a deep look at the relationship between Cheney and Bush, and comes up with some fascinating and troubling answers. While Bush devotes hundreds of hours giving speeches and Q & As to diehard Bush supporters in rural America, Cheney remains firmly in the seat of power back in Washington, pursuing what Dan Froomkin describes as his "relentless, secretive and smashingly successful quest to expand executive power."

If Bush is unable to finish out his term, or is unable to serve in the aftermath of an election canceling series of terror attacks or national disasters in 2008, Cheney would take over, and presumably make full use of all that expanded executive power.

A reporter for the New Yorker is quoted in the documentary as saying,"The strange thing about this administration is all of the most crucial decisions seem to be taking place in the vice president's office, or even the vice president's counsel's office."

Bush gave an interview to a stunningly uncritical Fox News special about Cheney, to provide some 'insight' into his relationship with his vice president. Bush appeared to have great trouble putting that relationship into firm focus.

Q : "What is the relationship between you and Vice President Cheney? There's a lot of people here who say it's a mystery."

Bush: "It's not a mystery to me. I've gotten to know him well over seven years -- six and a half as sitting vice president and half a year as a candidate. First, I would classify our relationship as very comfortable with each other. Dick Cheney is an easy guy to be around."

(voiceover) "The president even seemed to have a hard time characterizing his relationship with his vice president."

Bush: "I've come to admire him. So I would say it's a very comfortable, close relationship."

Q: "Is he a man of few words inside the White House? What's his style when you meet?"

Bush: "Well, we have several constant meetings. One, when it's just the vice president and me -- which happens on a weekly basis, you know -- he's quite verbose. He comes with things that he wants to talk about, issues that he wants to share concerns about, or things that he's seen or heard."

Q: "Some critics claim he's pulling the strings in this administration. Others don't go that far, they say he's managed to figure out the angles and present you with certain options that limit your options when it's time to make a decision comes."

Bush: "I think I'm wiser than that -- than to be pigeonholed or, you know, to get cornered by a wily advisor. Look, that's not the way it works. Dick Cheney walks in and I say, 'What's your advice on this subject?' And he gives it to me and I make up my mind based upon a variety of factors including the advice of key advisors and he is one of them."

Q: "Some people describe him as the most powerful vice president ever. Do you agree with that?"

Bush: "I would say he's very influential. But he was no more influential than a Condi Rice or a Bob Gates or a Steve Hadley. And the thing about Vice President Cheney is that his decision-making -- or his recommendations about my decision-making -- are based upon a core set of principles that are deeply rooted in his very being. He is predictable in many ways because he brings a set of beliefs. And they're firm beliefs."

Maybe Bush is afraid of saying too much.

Cheney : Bush Will Be Remembered Fondly...When He's Dead

Dick Cheney was interviewed by Larry King over the weekend, and spoke about the all important Bush legacy, and his own duties as vice president in backing the president, to the hilt.

From Raw Story :

President George W. Bush will be remembered fondly on his deathbed.

Vice President Dick Cheney appeared to deliver that message on CNN's Larry King Live Tuesday night. When asked if he should take the President's poor poll numbers more seriously, Cheney pointed to the administration of Gerald Ford, in which he also served. Ford, who replaced Richard Nixon after his resignation from the Watergate scandal, was remembered well after his death.

"[J]ust last year, when he passed away and we had memorial services and so forth for him, he was held in very high regard; across the country his praises were sung for some of the really tough decisions he made that were very unpopular at the time," Cheney insisted.

The Vice President's paralleling of Bush's 6 1/2 years with Ford's abbreviated succession into a disgraced presidency stood out in the pre-recorded interview, in which a largely defiant Cheney stood by his decisions and acknowledged little error or wrongdoing.

Cheney attempted to insist that as Vice Presidents have gone, he was more modest because he was not 'angling' for future elected office.

"I made the decision when I signed on with the President that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most Vice Presidents," he told King. "And that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected President when his term was over with."

President Bush Steps Down, Cheney Takes Control Of America

President Bush will hand over control of the United States to Vice President Dick Cheney today...for a few hours :

President Bush will undergo a "routine colonoscopy" at the Camp David retreat on Saturday, temporarily ceding his powers to Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House said Friday.

Cheney will serve as acting president until such time as Bush, who will be under anesthesia, says he is ready to resume his duties, presidential spokesman Tony Snow told reporters.

"The president has had no symptoms" of cancer, said Snow...

Dick Cheney, President Of The United States. A nation's blood runs cold.

Mainstream Media Wakes Up To Dictatorial Bush-Cheney Tag Team



By Darryl Mason

The so-called 'conspiracy' and alternative news sites have been cataloguing for more than four years that President Bush, through a series of signing statements, and fine-tuning of authoritarian fine print, has been removing both himself and Vice President, Dick Cheney, from the circles of accountability that Congress, and the American people, usually demand and expect from those who occupy office space in the White House.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, the mainstream American media has finally gotten around to examining just WTF Bush and Cheney are really up.

Of course, it's too late now for any huge media or public outrage to change the way the president and vice-president, do their business, and hide their secrets, and avoid being held accountable.

But then, isn't that always the way with the mainstream American media of today? We learn the truth, we learn the facts behind the lies and spin, but only when it's too late, when the damage has already been done, when there is no going back. The WMD fiasco that led to the Iraq War being the prime, but not only, example of this 'Too Late' revelatory news hitting the front pages.

Maybe before the 2004 election all this expose stuff about the secret presidency of Bush, and the ultra-secret vice-presidency of Dick Cheney, would have made a difference. But back then, nearly all the talk of Bush and Cheney rewriting the rules to give themselves the defacto powers of a dictatorship was confined to 'wacko' web sites.

Yes, learning it all back then, when it was first happening, perhaps then all these exposes and investigative stories might have changed the course of current American history. For the better.

But not now, of course. Bush and Cheney can do virtually anything they want between tomorrow and late January, 2009, and the media, Congress and the American people can do nothing to stop them, short of staging a military coup, or pouring five million protesters into Washington and driving the Bush regime from the West Wing.

Still, it's nice to see the New York Times, and the excellent (but late) investigation of Cheneystan from the Washington Post, finally telling the American people just how extreme the Bush administration has become when it comes to keeping their secrets, spying on Americans, lying for war and torture, and changing the rules of all the games so they will never have to pay for their crimes.

Here's a few chunks from the lead editorial of the New York Times, a few days ago, venting superbly. I read an almost identical editorial in mid-2004, but that was on a 'wacko' 'conspiracy' site :

President Bush has turned the executive branch into a two-way mirror. They get to see everything Americans do: our telephone calls, e-mail, and all manner of personal information. And we get to see nothing about what they do.

Everyone knows this administration has disdained openness and accountability since its first days. That is about the only thing it does not hide. But recent weeks have produced disturbing disclosures about just how far Mr. Bush’s team is willing to go to keep lawmakers and the public in the dark.

That applies to big issues — like the C.I.A.’s secret prisons — and to things that would seem too small-bore to order up a cover-up.

Vice President Dick Cheney sets the gold standard, placing himself not just above Congress and the courts but above Mr. Bush himself. For the last four years, he has been defying a presidential order requiring executive branch agencies to account for the classified information they handle. When the agency that enforces this rule tried to do its job, Mr. Cheney proposed abolishing the agency.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Bush has tried to excuse his administration’s obsession with secrecy by saying that dangerous times require greater discretion. He rammed the Patriot Act through Congress with a promise that national security agencies would make sure the new powers were not abused.

Governments have to keep secrets. But this administration has grossly abused that trust, routinely using claims of national security to hide policies that are immoral and almost certainly illegal, to avoid embarrassment, and to pursue Mr. Bush’s dreams of an imperial presidency.

That blood-chilling sound you can hear in the distance is Cheney himself, laughing long and hard and mumbling to himself : "So fucking what? What the fuck are you going to do about any of this? Come on. What are you going to do?"

Do You Want Bush & Cheney, Or Do You Want The Republic? You Can't Have Both

Bush Could Stop Cheney...But Why Would He Want To?

Robert Parry : America's Fragile Republic

Bush's America Becomes The Facsimile Of An Authoritarian State Run By The Mafia

Bush's Circle Of Friends And Allies Gets Ever Smaller

Former Advisor Perle Calls Bush A "Failure" For Not Destroying America's So-Called Enemies

With the upcoming departure of British prime minister, Tony Blair, the international circle of friends that President Bush relies on for support and belief in the need to continue the War On Iraq grows smaller.

Australian prime minister, John Howard, is only months away from losing a federal election (if current polls are to be believed). Then President Bush will only be able to count on the quieter support of the leaders of Japan and...ahhh....the Marshall Islands.

From news.com.au :

With Mr Blair set to bow out next month after 10 years in power, the end is nigh for a partnership that was forged in the searing cauldron of the September 11 attacks of 2001 and the subsequent war in Iraq.

"I'm going to miss him. He's a remarkable person. And I consider him a good friend," Mr Bush said last Friday after Mr Blair announced his intention to resign on June 27.

"When Tony Blair tells you something, as we say in Texas, you can take it to the bank."

In his emotional resignation speech last week, Mr Blair stood by his decision to stick "shoulder to shoulder" to Mr Bush despite the crippling cost it inflicted on his popularity in Britain.

He reaffirmed their friendship ahead of his last visit, saying he had learned to live with "poodle" taunts as he discussed Mr Bush in an interview broadcast today by NBC News.

"I've found him immensely straightforward to deal with, someone always true to his word and someone who's a very strong leader," the British Prime Minister said.

The caricature of Mr Blair as Mr Bush's "poodle" appeared confirmed after the President's "Yo! Blair" comments at last year's G8 summit in Russia. There is certainly no other foreign leader with whom Mr Bush is on such familiar terms.

Over Iraq, only Australian Prime Minister John Howard came close to Mr Blair's levels of backing for Mr Bush - and Mr Howard now faces a fight for his job against a resurgent Labor Opposition in elections expected later this year.

However, Mr Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last month put on the "Shinzo" and "George" show at a Camp David summit to send a message: New leader in Tokyo, same close ties to Washington.

The same may also prove to be true for the France's president Sarkozy, and Germany's Angela Merkel is also offering support to President Bush over the Iraq War, though in a much less public way than Tony Blair did.


Former advisor to the President, Richard Perle, says he is now cut off from wandering into the West Wing to ramp up the War On Iran rhetoric, after wandering into the West Wing to ramp up the War On Iraq rhetoric in 2002. Perhaps they don't let him in now because they think he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

Anyway, Perle is deep into a personal PR campaign to scrape as much of the blame for the Iraq War off himself as possible. Good luck with that, Richard.

Perle is also disgusted that matters regarding Iran are now being handled by the State Department, who don't go to war often enough for Perle. The State Department dealing with international affairs! Imagine that :

The Bush administration is beginning to appease rather than confront America's enemies, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board and leading neoconservative thinker said yesterday, describing the president as "a failure" who is proving powerless to impose his views on his administration.

Richard Perle offered a withering assessment of the president's impotence at a meeting of the Hudson Institute in New York, saying American foreign policy is being applied by an out-of-control State Department.

"We have already seen a change in policy towards Iran," he said. "It is now firmly back in the hands of the Department of State."

Mr. Perle's assessment is recognized by an expert on defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Donnelly, who said Mr. Bush is routinely frustrated by "establishment" thinking within Washington and that the failure to respond to the president's more radical thinking has harmed American policy in Iraq.

But the characterization of a divided administration frustrating the president's wishes is inaccurate, according the director of the foreign policy program at the New America Foundation, Steven Clemons, who said he thinks Mr. Bush is allowing Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Rice to play good cop, bad cop with the Iranians.

Mr. Perle said the president has failed to control his administration from the start and that bad appointments have ensured that he is isolated from the rest of the government, aside from close allies such as Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney.

The president's failure to get his own way stems from his general inexperience in foreign affairs and his ignorance of the way Washington works, Mr. Perle suggested. "He came ill-equipped for the job and has failed to master it," he said. "I do not meet the president, but from the people I meet who are close to him and from his speeches, I believe the gap between the president and his administration is without precedent."

"He was only in office a short time when 9/11 took place. … This president appointed people he hardly knew. He didn't know Colin Powell," Mr. Perle added. "He delegated a great deal. He thought he would give general direction and that the machinery would do what he wanted done. But the machinery wouldn't do what he wanted done."

The State Department is "institutionally disposed to settle problems through compromise, to settle rather than to fight," Mr. Perle said. This is dangerous because many enemies of America remain who are prepared to continue fighting when offered a settlement. "You cannot settle with Al Qaeda. You cannot settle with Islamist extremists. Those who suggest we can do great damage," he said.

Mr. Bush displayed weakness in the face of Syria and failed to convincingly condemn the visit of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, to Damascus "because he had authorized some Republicans to talk to Assad," he said.

Mr. Perle said the current policy toward Iraq has no more than nine months to run: It either will have achieved success by then or will have to be abandoned. "That is why I find it strange that the Democrats should take short-term political advantage. They have only to wait," he said.

The U.S. Army "is not terribly well equipped" to fight the insurgency in Iraq, he said, and the Defense Department is still planning an army to fight a Russian advance in Central Europe. "We sent over the only Army we had," he said. He added that he thinks the coalition should have handed the country over to the Iraqis in October 2003, when the insurgency began.

Nor did Mr. Perle offer any optimism that the current surge policy, which he said he believed was correct in conception, would succeed. "People have retreated behind the Iranian border, out of harm's way, biding their time," he said.

While Perle makes some interesting points, his ongoing anti-Bush campaign is more to do with saving his own name and professional reputation from sinking into the muck pit, sucking down most of those who advocated a War On Iraq at all costs.

Perle has rattled off his claim that Iraq should have been handed back to the Iraqis in October 2003 so many times in recent weeks, that people are starting to believe he is right, and that he actually held this position back then.

Of course, Perle never said a word about it at the time. Back then he was still claiming, like Cheney and the rest of the Occupy Iraq team, that the insurgency was minimal and not a long-term threat, and the occupation had to continue, for the good of the Iraqis.

The more former Iraq War cheerleaders like Perle try and rewrite history, and their role in the mess, the more President Bush looks like a man of substance.

But Perle's attack on Bush makes one thing extremely clear : the ultimate blame for what's happened in Iraq will be hung on Bush, and Bush alone. The role of people like Perle, and the lobbying power of AIPAC in the run-up to the Iraq War, will be downplayed and reduced, at least they will try to do this in a very public way.

Perle will make sure Cheney is able to deflect most of the blame for Iraq, without directly blaming the president himself. Even though Cheney has, in subtle ways, already begun to do this.

War With Iran? What A Laugh

An interesting exchange with President Bush, who's always ready with a laugh, regardless of how serious the issue is that brings on the guffaws.

From UPI :

At a farewell reception at Blair House for the retiring chief of protocol, Don Ensenat, who was President Bush's Yale roommate, the president shook hands with Washington Life Magazine's Soroush Shehabi.

"I'm the grandson of one of the late Shah's ministers," said Soroush, "and I simply want to say one U.S. bomb on Iran and the regime we all despise will remain in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians will become radicalized."

"I know," President Bush answered.

"But does Vice President Cheney know?" asked Soroush.

President Bush chuckled and walked away