Less than a week after his former chief of staff was convicted on four counts of perjury, Vice President Dick Cheney is scheduled to address the most important annual conference of pro-Israel activists.

This marks the second year in a row that the vice president will speak at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s benchmark event. Cheney represents the Bush administration’s hardest line on containing Iran’s nuclear program, a central strategy for the pro-Israel lobby powerhouse known as Aipac.

He is scheduled to speak March 12, six days after his former chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted by a jury on four of five counts. Libby, who is Jewish, was among the top Bush administration officials accused of leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, to reporters in 2003 as part of a campaign to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, a prominent Iraq War critic. Prosecutors decided against charges related to the leak of classified information but went forward with charges that Libby obscured his role in the leak from prosecutors.

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Cheney arrived at last year’s Aipac conference with an approval rating of less than 20%. But the vice president was received enthusiastically, drawing 48 rounds of applause from the 4,500 assembled delegates — including eight standing ovations.

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