Video - Earlier today Dick 'Five Deferments' Cheney gets a spirited welcome at CPAC from some Ron Paul conservatives - Feb. 10, 2011
Cheney was at CPAC this afternoon to present the Defender of the Constitution Award to Don Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was booed loudly when he made his own entrance just a few minutes earlier. A large contingent of the audience also got up and left in protest. Beautiful.
C-SPAN has it all on video (no embed). Fun with Rummy starts at 3:11:00.
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Ron Paul supporters speak out on Cheney - TPM
It was all very odd, especially considering that when Cheney appeared as the "surprise guest" at last year's CPAC he was greeted with the kind of cheers generally reserved for a rock star. But Team Paul -- whose numbers appear to have grown at CPAC in 2011 -- were not going to let that happen this time around.
"Uh, Defender of the Constitution?" Justin Bradfield of Maryland scoffed when I caught up with him after he walked out of Rumsfeld's speech. "Let's see: he expanded the Defense Department more than pretty much any other defense secretary and he enforced the Patriot Act."
"[Speaking] as a libertarian, that's not really the type of person who should be getting Defender of the Constitution," he added.
Bradfield said the moment showed that "half" of CPAC this year is libertarian, which means his side is winning in the civil war between "libertarians and right-wing conservatives."
"We're loud," he said.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/paul-supporters-hijack-cheney-rumsfeld-reunion.php
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Here's more detail on Cheney's lack of military service.
Elizabeth Cheney, Deferment Baby
How Dick Cheney dodged the Vietnam draft
"[T]he Senator from Massachusetts has given us ample doubts about his judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security," Vice President Dick Cheney said during a March 17 visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. He was talking, of course, about John Kerry, the putative Democratic presidential nominee. During the past three years, we've all become better acquainted with Vice President Cheney's judgment and attitude toward national security, which are a good deal more hawkish than Kerry's. A widely observed irony is that the dovish Kerry saw combat in Vietnam while the hawkish Cheney accepted a series of student and family-related draft deferments. Cheney's unself-consciousness about this is (or at least was) so pronounced that in 1989 he told George C. Wilson of the Washington Post, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."
http://www.slate.com/id/2097365/