Who has Been THE Scariest Vice President?

g under p

Is it LBJ, George H. W. Bush, Dan Quayle or Sarah Palin hell no it has to be Dick Cheney for sure.

He was so ruthless that he almost brought down his own President with his limitless drive for warrant-less spying worse than what happened to Richard Nixon. This with the revelations from the book Cheney’s Drive for Warrantless Spying Nearly Brought Down Bush Presidency

We speak to award-winning journalist Barton Gellman about his new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. Gellman reveals Cheney played a crucial role in maintaining warrantless spying even after Justice Department officials began to doubt its legality in 2004. Gellman writes: “The history of the Bush administration cannot be written without close attention to the moments when Cheney took the helm—sometimes at Bush’s direction, sometimes with his tacit consent, and sometimes without the president’s apparent awareness.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you know, the McCain campaign threatened to sue the National Enquirer over a story they had on Sarah Palin, and the response of the National Enquirer was, you know, we’ve investigated—I don’t if they said—we’ve investigated her for a few weeks—this was just after her candidacy was announced—which is more than we can say for you, they said to the McCain campaign, in vetting her for vice president.


Well, let’s go back to the current vice president and how he was chosen. Wasn’t he in charge of the vice-presidential pick for George Bush?


BARTON GELLMAN: Yeah, well, everyone knows that Bush asked Dick Cheney to manage and oversee the vice-presidential selection process, and there have been jokes for years about how he selected himself. And honestly, that’s not true. Bush did choose him.


But the process made for an interesting contrast to Sarah Palin’s. Dick Cheney oversaw the most probing, most intrusive vetting of potential vice presidents that I think there’s ever been. He had, for sure, the longest questionnaire, questions that went to as bald as: is there something that could be used to blackmail you, and if so, what? But he was looking for direct access. He insisted that the candidates sign waivers allowing him complete access to their medical and psychiatric records, FBI files, financial files, IRS returns, and so on.


Now, to a substantial degree, that’s appropriate. You don’t want to have a blackmailable vice president and potential commander-in-chief. The tricky thing is that when they pulled the switch and when Dick Cheney became the President’s choice or the candidate’s choice, he did not go through the same vetting process. He did not fill out his own questionnaire, which is contrary to what the campaign said at the time. He did not turn over even most of his public documents, old speeches and testimony and so forth. Halliburton would not cooperate with financial inquiries. And the cardiac surgeon, an eminent, famous surgeon, who was brought out by the campaign to vouch for Cheney’s heart health, says in an on-the-record interview in the book that he never actually met Cheney or reviewed his medical records.

Peace

kcherub

Hey just looks menacing, and HE.SHOT.SOMEONE.

In the head, wasn't it?!?

Political stuff aside.

g under p

kcherub wrote:

Hey just looks menacing, and HE.SHOT.SOMEONE.

In the head, wasn't it?!?

Political stuff aside.

Oh yeah totally forgot about that. he even took over the Presidency briefly shortly after the 9/II attacks when contact with President was not there. He gave an order to shoot down any incoming planes to Washington. Give this interview a listen, watch or read it's interesting in dealing with the mentality of Dick Cheney.

Peace

digster

I couldn't claim to remember that many VPs, but of the ones I do remember, Cheney by miles.

Cosmo

Has to be Dick Cheney:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40452000/jpg/_40452701_burns203.jpg

DriftingByTheStorm

I would still go with LBJ.

Pretty hard to win out over a man who conspired with the CIA to have the sitting President murdered.

:cool:

catefrances

kcherub wrote:

Hey just looks menacing, and HE.SHOT.SOMEONE.

In the head, wasn't it?!?

Political stuff aside.

yeah but he thought the guy was a bird. so its ok. anyone could have made that mistake.

Brain of J.Lo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Fs9O2Hji8

'nuff said.

norm

Rockefeller

Enkidu

I just read the title of this thread out loud to get my husband's opinion and my just turned 12 year old daughter said, "Dick Cheney." Even the children know.

g under p

I liked this question and answer on Cheney and his drive for power. It would be a far scarier thing if he ever became President, far scarier.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you whether—the extraordinary power of Vice President Dick Cheney has been remarked upon quite often, but I don’t think it’s ever been quite given in such detail, how it developed and accumulated, as you have in this book.


9/11 and the days—the actual day of 9/11 and the days afterwards, and Cheney’s role in that—you go into that quite in detail. If you could talk about some of the especially unusual aspects of the role that he assumed in those days?


BARTON GELLMAN: Well, you had the unfortunate coincidence of the President being, as everyone knows, in a schoolroom reading The Pet Goat to elementary school students when the attacks took place. And they have very good communications for the President, but he was still hard to reach and not in the thick of things. And Dick Cheney just took command.


He was hustled down to the White House bunker, the PEOC, they call it, Presidential Emergency Operations Center. And one intriguing thing to note, from a close look at the record, is that if American Flight 77 had in fact been aiming at the White House, which is what the Secret Service thought when they dragged him double-speed down to the bunker, he would have lost the race: the plane would have struck the White House before he got to the bunker.


Down inside, he was focused very much on sort of the need to direct the cabinet, emergency decision making. There is new reason to doubt the story that he and President Bush said, that when he gave the famous shoot-down order, to say that if there were additional hijacked planes coming towards Washington or anywhere else, that the Air Force had authority to shoot them down. And at the time he gave that order, he believed that there was a plane on the way right now. There’s new reasons to doubt that Bush authorized that in advance. It looks as though the Vice President made that decision on his own and looked for a blessing afterward.


Now, to me, actually, just as a citizen, if the President can’t be reached and a plane is considered to be a couple of minutes from Washington and could strike Congress, which happens to sort of be pretty full at the moment, or the Supreme Court, which happens to be hosting a national conference of federal judges at that moment, I’m not sure I would want him to stand on exact procedure and let the plane come in because the President can’t be reached. What’s troubling here and what’s kind of a precursor to what comes later is that the President and Vice President did not level with us about the way it happened.


JUAN GONZALEZ: And in the days after 9/11, the role that he began to assume?


BARTON GELLMAN: Well, even, actually, as of that day, he made an interesting decision. You’re in the middle of an ongoing emergency. There are so many decisions to make about restarting aviation, which has never been shut down in this country; reopening the stock markets; what to say to other countries; what steps to take at the borders. And one of the things that Cheney does is he calls for his lawyer, David Addington. “Please come back down here into the bunker. We have things to talk about.” And as early as the day of 9/11, they were talking together about what new powers the President would require and what legal changes would be required in order to empower the commander-in-chief the way Cheney thought he should be empowered.

Peace

CitizenRick

What's really scary...is that Cheney IS the scariest VP ever...and we hardly ever saw him.

BTW...Palin will demolish Cheney in a scariest contest if we allow ourselves to be fooled into voting the republican ticket into the White House.

tybird

DriftingByTheStorm wrote:

I would still go with LBJ.

Pretty hard to win out over a man who conspired with the CIA to have the sitting President murdered.

:cool:

LBJ has my vote too.

iamica

Dick Cheney.
Although Dan Quayle couldn't spell "potato"...that scared me too.

DixieN

Spiro Agnew, Tricky Dick's man. A fitting match, but a scary one. He was Dick Cheney before Dick Cheney was much of anything, loving a good lie and the spreading of disinformation as far and wide as it could be sprinkled. A good apostle to Tricky Dick, he nevertheless left the Vice Presidency in disgrace after he pleaded no contest to criminal charges of tax evasion and money laundering.

Anon

Darth Cheney. Bush is a stupid man but I don't really hate him; I just think he's completely overmatched by the job.

Cheney, on the other hand, is a vile human being. A draft dodger, a chickenhawk with no compunctions about sending those less connected and priviliged to die in unnecessary wars, a schemer, a war profiteer, and a man whose contempt for the democratic process is patently obvious. Dishonorable in every respect. A crook. Hate is not too strong a word for my feelings concerning him.