Until now, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney has taken the criticism levelled at him by his successor Joe Biden in silence. Biden said in October:

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.”

But Cheney returned fire this morning in an appearance on Fox News Sunday, mocking Biden’s apparent misunderstanding of the office he will be holding for at least the next four years :

“He also said that all the powers and responsibilities of the executive branch are laid out in Article I of the Constitution,” Cheney said in a interview that was conducted on Friday. “Well, they’re not. Article I of the Constitution is the one on the legislative branch.”

“Joe’s been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a member of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate for 36 years, teaches constitutional law back in Delaware, and can’t keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature and which provides for the executive. So I think I’d write that off as campaign rhetoric. I don’t take it seriously.”

As his parting shot in the game of one-upmanship, the vice president dropped this bomb on the Deleware senator who will succeed him in the office which is just a heartbeat away from the presidency:

“If he wants to diminish the office of the vice president, that’s obviously his call,” Cheney shrugged. “President-elect Obama will decide what he wants in a vice president and apparently, from the way they’re talking about it, he does not expect him to have as consequential a role as I have had during my time.”

Blam!

- JP