Bush Returns to Oval Office After Surgery

Routine exam briefly gives VP power

(NEWSER) - President Bush will undergo a routine colon exam tomorrow, leaving Dick Cheney in the driver's seat for roughly 2½ hours while he's under anesthesia. Bush's personal physician will supervise the procedure, in the medical facility at Camp David. This will be the second time the VP has acted as president; the first was during Bush's last colonoscopy, in 2002. More»

Members of inner circle rip beliefs about presidency as 'hooey'

(NEWSER) - Popular beliefs about the Bush presidency are way off the mark, a pair of top advisers who served throughout the administration tell the Washington Post. The idea that Vice President Dick Cheney wielded unprecedented power and pulled the strings on Bush's foreign policy is "just hooey," said Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten. More»

Next cancer screening moved up, scheduled for 3 years from now

(NEWSER) - The five polyps removed from President Bush during his Saturday colonoscopy were benign, the AP reports. Tony Snow said today that Bush's doctors had not expected to find any malignant growths, and he will undergo a colonoscopy again in 2010 rather than waiting the usual 5 years because of his history of polyp growth. More»

But detected deadly White House toxin turned out to be false alarm

(NEWSER) - Condoleezza Rice recounted the day that she, President Bush, and Dick Cheney believed they had been exposed to a lethal toxin by terrorists. Cheney suddenly appeared on a secure video conference screen just weeks after 9/11 while Rice and Bush were traveling in China for the APEC summit. He warned them that White House sensors had detected botulinum toxin, and "we all—those of us exposed—were going to die," Rice revealed in an ABC interview . "I remember everybody just sort of freezing, and the president saying, ‘What was that? What was that, Dick?’” recalled Rice, who was national security adviser at the time. “We were just a little unnerved." More»

She recalls clashes with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush

(NEWSER) - It's time for Dick Cheney to take a little return fire from Condi Rice. Less than 2 months after his memoir described her as turning tearful during a political discussion , Condoleezza Rice has written her own book, No Higher Honor, which comes out next month, the New York Times reports. Rice recalls White House clashes and encounters with creepy foreign leaders:

• Rice argued with "ultra-hawkish" Cheney that terrorism suspects can't just be "disappeared"; President Bush agreed, and moved several from secret prisons to Guantanamo Bay.
• Rice opposed increasing troop levels in Iraq, telling Bush, "If they want to have a civil war we're going to have to let them." The president appeared pained over a war going badly, she writes.