Fox News Channel‘s Megyn Kelly hosted former Vice President Dick Cheney along with Liz Cheney last night to discuss reactions to their father/daughter Wall Street Journal op/ed in which the Cheneys wondered out loud why President Obama hasn’t done jack squat to clean up Cheney’s colossal mess in Iraq.
The segment is being widely circulated in social media as one of those rare occasions when a non-Shepard-Smith Fox News host asked a prominent Republican salient, hardball questions. But it really wasn’t like that at all. Megyn Kelly merely repeated a few items based on material written by those whom she described as “the president’s defenders,” which is code for alerting Fox News viewers that this information is from The Enemy and therefore isn’t to be trusted. In fact, the final several questions from Kelly were direct hits against President Obama for the benefit of promoting the Cheneys’ new “Alliance For A Strong America” organization, and its mission to attack the administration.
Kelly aside, even though Dick Cheney’s heart is held in place with bungee cords and paper-clips, his balls seem to be functioning just as mightily as ever because in the face of an onslaught of counterattacks he repeated and even elaborated upon some of the biggest lies and attacks from his WSJ editorial.
Right off the bat, Cheney said:
I think we went into Iraq for very good reasons.
Fine, but all of those reasons turned out to be wrong. Even the “democracy” reason, since Iraq appears to less and less a self-determining, sovereign democracy and more of a hot-swappable U.S. puppet government.
Cheney continued:
After 9/11, we were concerned about a follow-up attack, it would involve not just airline tickets and box cutters, but something far deadlier, perhaps even a nuclear weapon.
Okay, “just” box cutters and airline tickets? How about passenger airplanes filled with jet fuel used as missiles and aimed at the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon and unsuccessfully at the U.S. Capitol. Also, after all this time, Cheney tried again to shamelessly sell a connection between Saddam, al-Qaeda and 9/11. It’s been roughly a decade since that connection was debunked, yet there he was on national television doing it again. Breaking down that sentence, Cheney believed nuclear weapons were being developed by Iraq and, to this day, he wants you to think that had it not been for his war, Iraq might’ve deployed al-Qaeda terrorists with those weapons for use in another attack on the U.S. This is a big lie.
Next, talk about deflecting the blame:
Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to. We had an overwhelming vote of approval from the Congress. More votes for the action than we’d had in Desert Storm years prior. Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi spoke to the difficulties of the intelligence that all of us saw with respect to the threat that Saddam Hussein represented. It would have been irresponsible for us not to act.
Several things here… CONTINUE READING
(ht Patrick Rooney)