I don't know what's worse: Dick and Liz Cheney's blaming President Obama for the mess in the Middle East the Bush administration precipitated or Fox News repeatedly giving them undeserved credibility and a warm welcome to do so. 

Earlier yesterday, I noted how Sean Hannity and Fox News complained about the left criticizing President Bush during a time of war. So did Dick Cheney and the Republicans.

Apparently, the rules are entirely different when it’s a Democratic president at war. Last night, Dick and Liz Cheney spent a comfy, cozy double segment on Hannity where they threw stones at President Obama from their glass house.

Liz Cheney complained that Obama’s strategy for dealing with ISIS is “insufficient.” She also sneered that Obama was “at odds with the reality” because he “can’t let go of” his ideology. Translation: Obama’s too pro-Muslim.

As disgusting as that is, let’s talk about “insufficient” and “at odds with the reality,” shall we?

As The Week noted in March, 2013, the Bush administration said the Iraq war would be a “cakewalk” and that it would be cheap, $50-$60 billion:

It actually cost 31 times as much: $1.7 trillion... And that’s before an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans. Factor in veterans’ care and interest and the true cost over the next 40 years could be $6 trillion. Was the war itself even paid for? It was not. Turning his back on the greatest Republican of all — Abraham Lincoln, who asked Congress to raise taxes to pay for the Civil War — Bush asked Congress to cut taxes, a principal driver (along with spending related to his recession of 2007-09) of our current deficits.

Furthermore, we can lay a lot of the instability Obama is dealing with now at Dick “I had other priorities when I had the chance to serve” Cheney. Also from The Week:

In fact, the war appears to have opened a Pandora’s Box in the Middle East that has made us less safe. At least that was the consensus of the heads of America’s 16 intelligence agencies, who concluded in a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that the Iraq war had increased Islamic radicalism and worsened the threat to America from terrorism. And that’s not all: It also strengthened Iran. Iraq and Iran were bitter foes that fought each other to a standstill in an eight-year war in the 1980s. When the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein, some of the biggest smiles were found in Tehran, which became, in relative terms, a much stronger player in the Persian Gulf. Don’t take my word for it. That’s what George W. Bush’s own ambassador to Iraq from 2005-07, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been saying for years. Iran, whose Muslims are mostly Shiites, is now a “key power broker” in Iraq, whose majority Shiite population was brutally repressed by Saddam’s minority Sunni government for decades. 

And, of course, that’s not counting the fact that we were led into war under the false threat that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

As for Liz, Politico described her failed bid for the U.S. Senate as “a six-month-long exhibit of mishaps and drama.”

Sean Hannity, however, presented the Cheneys as masterminds of national security and icons of competence. And a means to frighten Americans into thinking Obama is going to get us all killed.

Hannity’s concern that criticizing the president in a time of war undermines our troops and emboldens our enemies vanished as he prodded the Cheneys by "asking," “Where does ISIS take us if we don’t really defeat them now?”

Sure enough, Cheney was ready to fear monger like it was 2003 all over again. He was very concerned about the “linkage” between “terrorism on the one hand” and “deadlier weapons” on the other.

Even worse, Cheney argued Obama should handle Iraq like Bush did. “When we did Desert Storm, we gave ‘em the whole load the first night of the war. We pulled out all the stops in terms of using all of our capability,” Cheney said. He claimed Obama’s “pinprick attacks” would give the enemy “time to adjust.” As if the Iraq war ended quickly and easily. As if Iraq had not gone to hell for the remaining five years of Bush’s term after the country got "the whole load." 

As the segment ended, Liz Cheney accused Obama of having come into office “determined to take America down a notch and, sadly, he’s been effective at doing that in many ways.”

I’m all for dissent and criticism of President Obama’s policies. But this was nothing but political exploitation designed to take our president down (and not just a notch) without offering anything constructive in return.