Dick Cheney’s back again! Less than a week after Megyn Kelly called him out for being “so wrong about so much” in Iraq, he got a double segment with lapdog Sean Hannity where the two agreed that everything wrong in Iraq is President Obama’s fault – because the Bush administration invasion was so fab. And in case that isn’t 2003 all over again enough for you, Cheney and Hannity got all mushroom cloudy on us.
I can’t help but wonder if Cheney’s Hannity gig wasn’t a deliberate dose of Republican rehab. Not only did Kelly’s interview go viral – at Cheney’s expense – but last night Jon Stewart made great fun of Cheney – now memorably dubbed as “America’s tragedy herpe.”
Hannity wasted no time assuring us viewers that Iraq was “certainly better off than it was” and that it had become an “ally in the region” thanks to the Bush administration’s invasion (under false pretenses). Now, it has all fallen apart and not only is it Obama’s fault, Hannity faulted Obama for not taking responsibility.
As if Cheney has. Instead, the guy from the administration asleep at the switch on 9/11 began laying the foundation to blame Obama for any and all future terrorism:
I think it’s important to understand, this isn’t just about Iraq. …It’s part of a much larger problem. …It’s the fact that now Iraq and Syria are both potential trouble spots. And as we see this proliferation of terrorists, we’ve also, at the same time, had an administration that didn’t want to recognize there was a problem.
Hannity helpfully suggested that if President Obama had left troops in Iraq, “We wouldn’t be where we are today.”
“I think that’s an accurate statement,” Cheney said.
Then it was time to ratchet up the fear factor, too.
Cheney said:
As we’ve seen this proliferation of terrorist organizations, there’s also the problem of proliferating nuclear capability. We’ve now got the terrorist Taliban organization in Pakistan conducting a big raid on Karachi airport. Why do we care about Pakistan? Well, they have 50-100 nukes. And if you combine the terrorists with the ability to get their hands on a weapon of some kind, then obviously, we’re gonna see a very serious situation.
Hannity just wanted to make sure he understood Cheney – by dialing up the rhetoric. “If we don’t get real about the rise and the march of radical Islam right now… literally we face the potential of a human catastrophe on a scale that we’ve not seen before. Am I reading into that?”
Yes, that’s exactly what Cheney was getting at:
I think that’s an accurate statement. I think that threat will increase dramatically and as - well, we already know, for example, from A. Q. Khan, the man who put together the Pakistan nuclear program and then was under house arrest because he was selling stuff to the Libyans, he has said publicly in the press, a couple of years ago, that the Pakistanis sold nuclear technology to the North Koreans. And we know the North Koreans built a reactor for the Syrians which was taken out by the Israelis back in ’07. So there’s a network developing there where access to that kind of technology obviously becomes increasingly problematic. On top of that, we’ve got Iran trying to build a nuclear program.
Hannity interrupted, once again to make the rhetoric more incendiary: “I see the world the way you do. I view this as a real clear and present danger. Almost the potential for a modern day holocaust that we’ve not seen. Maybe in your grandkids’ lives or my kids’ lives. Pretty scary stuff.”
And yet neither one of these two seem to be lifting a finger to help the situation other than to use it for their own political gain.
Watch the two chickenhawks deliberately frighten Americans to score partisan political points below. Then have some laughts watching Jon Stewart tear apart Cheney.
What I hate about Stalin is this – he didn’t go far enough!
Geeeee, I wonder when all that changed? That was a fad that didn’t live very long. If I’m not mistaken it faded sometime around January 20, 2009.