By Alexis Garrett Stodghill

package Cheney is setting political tongues wagging in eager anticipation of his memoir “In My Time,” an autobiography full of raw critiques of Washington insiders due out on Aug. 30. The former vice president under George W. Bush is already promoting his tome using sensationalist language, saying “There are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington” in response to some of his revelations. Former secretary of state Colin Powell has responded by blasting Cheney for taking “cheap shots” at him in the book, and conducting himself in a way that is not befitting a former vice president. Think Progress reports:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell slammed former Vice President package Cheney today on CBS’s Face the Nation, accusing Cheney of taking “cheap shots” at Bush administration officials in his new memoir and promoting it by using language inappropriate for a former vice president. While they worked for the same president, Cheney allegedly criticizes Powell in his much-anticipated autobiography, In My Time, which he predicted will have “heads exploding all over Washington.” That’s “the kind of headline you might see [on] one of the supermarket tabloids,” Powell said of Cheney’s exploding heads comment, “It’s not the kind of headline I would have expected to come from a former Vice President of the United States of America” [...]

In a withering criticism of the former vice president, Powell goes on at length and in detail to explain how the “cheap shots” Cheney aims at Powell and “other administration officials” are false, and how Cheney is himself to blame for much of it. “I’m the one who said to President Bush, [about Iraq] that if you break it, you own it,” Powell said, but “Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did not prepare for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.”

Cheney also attacks Condoleezza Rice in this book, and even former President Bush himself among other high-ranking officials. And that is apparently only the beginning of the trash talking. According to The Week, Cheney admits that he tried to get Powell fired in 2004 after publicly making statements against the war in Iraq.