Dick Cheney: What the bastard son of Joseph Stalin and Lizzy Borden has become

After dropping out of Yale he decided: politics.

His political career began during the Nixon administration at the United States Office of Economic Opportunity as a special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld beginning in the spring of 1969. He went on to weasel his way into becoming the youngest White House Chief of Staff undger Ford. (To achieve that, he and Rumsfeld pushed Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to look for another job and remove Henry Kissinger from his post as national security adviser.)

From 1978 unitl 1989, he served as a member of the Congress representing Wyoming, his home state. Under George H. W. Bush he was the Secretary of Defense from 1989 unitl 1993.

When the Dems took back the presidency in 1993, he joined the American Enterprise Institute which has guided George W. Bush's policy and the neo-conservative movement very blatantly considering that over two dozen people from the Institute have been appointed to policy, panel and/or commission posts.

Of course, who could forget that he was the Chairman and CEO of Halliburton from 1995 until 2000. While he was at Halliburton he, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Donald Rumsfeld founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997, with the stated goal of establishing "American global leadership". (Remember, PNAC called for a "new Pearl Harbor" to make that prospect a reality. [see page 51 of Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, And Resources For A New Century])

In 2001, he became Vice President of the United States.

What are the most important things that he's done in all the intervening years?

Opposed legislation such as: Safe Drinking Water Act, funding for the Veterans Administration, extensions of the Civil Rights Act, creating the Department of Education, banning cop-killer bullets, banning plastic guns that could slip through metal detectors, requiring industry from making public records of emissions known to cause cancer, birth defects and other chronic diseases,

Fought the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in South Africa

Asked thousands to risk their lives while having deferred military service five times

Stumped for torture

Authorized the release of classified information to the media

Misled the country with forged intelligence documents into Iraq

Pushed for the consolidation of power in the president

Directed 911


Read the letter John Conyers sent to Bush and Cheney about the release of classified material here.