Ever since the Bush presidency ended with everyone oddly feeling kind of bad for our Worst President and Dick Cheney riding out to his undisclosed Virginia office building in a wheelchair like Mister Potter, Cheney has said evil things to anyone with a microphone or notepad who happens to wander by him.

First, it was "the new secret Muslim president will start a nuclear war, at your Wal-Mart, so be scared of him." This dire warning he mumbled to a Politico reporter who found the former Vice President in a broom closet he claimed belonged to the General Services Administration, who disavowed any knowledge of his actions. Cheney's bold, openly and proudly misleading bullshit was the sort of thing he hadn't actually been allowed to say in public since 2006 or so, because every time he spoke a Republican lost a Senate seat. (To be fair, that might not have been a causal relationship—Republican senators also kept being racist and fucking hookers around that time.)

Now he's bitching about the gravest injustice of the Bush years: that's right, the president's refusal to pardon Scooter Libby, a dumb political hack bureaucrat who got caught up in Cheney's game of discrediting administration critics by any means necessary, which in this case involved revealing a covert CIA operative's name to the press, because why not. Scooter Libby, Cheney's former Chief of Staff, was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and Bush immediately commuted the sentence, but Cheney apparently wasn't satisfied.

Several sources confirmed Cheney refused to take no for an answer. "He went to the mat and came back and back and back at Bush," a Cheney defender said. "He was still trying the day before Obama was sworn in."

After repeatedly telling Cheney his mind was made up, Bush became so exasperated with Cheney's persistence he told aides he didn't want to discuss the matter any further.

The unsuccessful full-court press left Cheney bitter. "He's furious with Bush," a Cheney source told The News. "He's really angry about it and decided he's going to say what he believes."

Man, Cheney versus Bush! After years of letting the evil genius push the man-child president around, our little moron-in-chief finally stood up to him! And now Cheney's furious! What's that crazy feeling...? Is it... grudging respect for the former president? Hah, that's just what Cheney wants you to feel.

Maybe—maybe!—the Cheney-Bush relationship suffered when Bush accepted Rumsfeld's resignation (the second time), and maybe the Libby pardon thing really got his goat, but if you don't think Cheney's willing to continue playing the part of World's Most Evil Man in the service of helping Bush's legacy, the task all former administration officials have gladly been working on for the better part of a year, than you underestimate our Most Beloved Sith Lord Vice President.

Cheney's never wanted to run for anything, ever, and he's 100 years old and has had 200 heart attacks, so he really does not give a shit what you think about him. Bush, though, wants to be loved, and wants to be remembered fondly. Cheney sold us on a war through fear, surely selling us on the Goodness of a Shitty President the same way can't be too hard.

So don't buy it! Bush sucked and Cheney sucked and now America sucks, and just because they eventually had their petty differences doesn't mean we should be proud of the president for sticking up for himself against the vice president, a man who has absolutely no political powers besides those explicitly delegated to him by the guy who is supposed to be in charge.

• Barack Obama. Blago wanted to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder.
• Rahm Emanuel Obama's incoming chief of staff was the one Blago wanted to negotiate with—he hoped to get stuff from Rahm in exchange for picking Obama's preferred candidate. Also Rahm maybe alerted the feds!
• Tony Rezko This Chicago fundraiser and felon raised a fortune for Blago, and a smaller fortune for Obama back in the day. From Blago he got plum appointments for associates and friends, and lord knows what else.
• Sam Zell Blago was unhappy with the Chicago Tribune's coverage of how corrupt he was, so he told the owner of their parent company, Zell, to make them cut it out. Zell, who needed the state's help to unload the Chicago Cubs, allegedly agreed to look into it. Zell also connects us to Lee Abrams! Abrams is Zell's friend and Tribune Co's insane "Chief Innovation Officer." He will hopefully have a crazy memo about this soon.
• John McCormick This is the Tribune editor who was mean to Blago all the time. Supposedly Zell agreed to have him "restructured" out of his job in exchange for state help with Tribune's bankruptcy, but this didn't actually happen.
• Patrick Fitzgerald the dreamboat US Attorney who's bringing Blago down is known as a tenacious prosecutor, and he was already famous for his role investigating Plamegate, the weird old scandal in which Bush administration officials leaked the name of a covert CIA operative to journalists to damager her husband's credibility. That scandal, as we all remember, ended up with Times reporter and terrible hack Judy Miller going to jail rather than revealing to Fitzgerald that her source was Scooter Libby, even though Libby had already given her permission to reveal this.
• Jesse Jackson Jr. It's sill possible that "Senate Candidate 5" is Jesse Jackson, Jr. Even if he isn't, he's a family friend of the Obamas (specifically his childhood friend Michelle) who is seen by many as a front-runner for Obama's vacant seat. So Blago would obviously have been in contact with him regarding the seat, and what Blago wanted in exchange for giving it to him. Meanwhile Jackson's brother Yusef was an investor in a magazine called Radar with pervy billionaire friend-of-Clinton Ron Burkle!
• Also Jesse Jackson Sr was on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as was Kelly Preson, who was in Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon!

At the end of the interview, he said what he learned from this entire debacle is to keep his mouth shut. When the infuriatingly closeted Anderson Cooper came on just moments after, it was clear that Isaiah understands gay community, or at least one segment of it, far too well.

I Kinda Like Him Now [Fourfour]

Do we sound strident? Well, it's hard to watch a nation lead into a complete cock-up of an unnecessary war that has ruined so many lives and diminished our standing in the world and sacrificed the pretense that there's something especially noble about us (My country both performs and outsources torture! I cannot tell you how proud that makes me.) and not sound strident. It's hard to watch the deck reshuffled so that those who have more continue to get more and give back less and not sound strident. It's hard to watch the utter disregard for long-established precedents and rules go unpunished and not sound strident. And still: We can be angry, and we can hope that yesterday's events finally bring things back to "normal," whatever that was, but we're not counting on it. We've seen worse, and nothing has happened.

But remember this: The next time anyone from this administration or its enablers in the media stand up in front of the American people and talk about the "rule of law," they are full of shit. And the other side's not much better. We're sort of screwed.

We're aware that we've strayed a bit from our remit here, so we'll try and put it all in a perspective that skews to the site's format: A man who ended the career of a C.I.A. agent in an attempt to forestall criticism of manipulated and outright false intelligence designed to lead this country into a war it did not need to fight, and then lied about it, will spend less time in prison than Paris Hilton.

Bush Spares Libby 30-Month Jail Term [NYT]

Libby: Bush Himself Authorized Leak on Iraq [MSNBC.com]

Because Drudge is linking to the Sun's exclusive, their website is only intermittently working — it's the Republican agenda in action! Impressive synergy, that. If you can't read the actual article, we've got the important bits after the jump.

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter.
[...]
"Defendant testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to [Times reporter Judy] Miller on that occasion because it was thought that the NIE was 'pretty definitive' against what Ambassador Wilson had said and that the vice president thought that it was 'very important' for the key judgments of the NIE to come out," Mr. Fitzgerald wrote.

Mr. Libby is said to have testified that "at first" he rebuffed Mr. Cheney's suggestion to release the information because the estimate was classified. However, according to the vice presidential aide, Mr. Cheney subsequently said he got permission for the release directly from Mr. Bush. "Defendant testified that the vice president later advised him that the president had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE," the prosecution filing said.

One of the facts Mr. Libby said he planned to disclose to Ms. Miller was that the estimate, produced in October 2002, concluded that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium." This contention was sharply at odds with Mr. Wilson's op-ed piece which argued there was no evidence of such a procurement effort, at least on a trip he took to Africa at the CIA's request.

Bush Authorized Leak to Times, Libby Told Grand Jury [NY Sun]