Word: bushing
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...Longtime Cheney ally Donald Rumsfeld was eased out as Pentagon chief in late 2006, and Bush replaced him with Robert Gates, a former CIA director and Bush-family ally. Gates was as effective a bureaucratic player as Cheney - and much more of a pragmatist. "Bush was persuaded that the day of the neoconservatives had to be over, because the direction of his presidency had become politically unsustainable," says a well-informed adviser. "It wasn't so much a repudiation of Cheney or Cheneyism but a practical judgment that the previous approach simply wasn't working." (See America's worst Vice...
...Pardon Book The final days of the Bush White House were dominated by worries about the gasping economy, farewell interviews by senior officials and plenty of stories about Bush's dismal approval ratings as he prepared to leave town. But the "elephant in the room," as an adviser puts it, was the still unresolved case of Libby. Many in the West Wing feared that the matter threatened to rend Bush and Cheney's relationship because of the intensity of Cheney's campaign for a full and final pardon...
...Bush had long approached pardons with suspicion. As Texas governor, he granted them sparingly. His reluctance stemmed not from a lack of mercy but from his sense that pardons were a rigged game, tilted in favor of offenders with political connections. "He thought the whole pardon system was completely corrupt," says a top Bush adviser. Bush had a textbook illustration in one of his predecessor's last acts: Bill Clinton's eleventh-hour pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife had contributed heavily to his campaigns and presidential library, created a firestorm that consumed Clinton as he left...
...Bush announced 19 pardons. No big names. No apparent political sponsors. But one planned pardon went to a Brooklyn, N.Y., developer who had pleaded guilty in the early 2000s to lying to federal housing authorities. After news accounts surfaced that his father had given nearly $30,000 to the Republican Party earlier that year, the White House backpedaled. It didn't help that one of the lawyers who had sought the pardon had once worked in Bush's own counsel's office - exactly the kind of inside favoritism Bush despised. Bush, who had retreated to Camp David for a last...
...Petitions for pardons are usually sent in writing to the White House counsel's office or a specially designated attorney at the Department of Justice. In Libby's case, Cheney simply carried the message directly to Bush, as he had with so many other issues in the past, pressing the President in one-on-one meetings or in larger settings. A White House veteran was struck by his "extraordinary level of attention" to the case. Cheney's persistence became nearly as big an issue as the pardon itself. "Cheney really got in the President's face," says a longtime Bush...