SALON

Monday, Feb 11, 2013 9:00 PM UTC

Dick Cheney helps his cousin

His trashing the president reminds liberals that Obama isn’t quite “Cheney-lite” on national security. Updated

By

Topics: Dick Cheney, Editor's Picks, President Obama, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, John Brennan, ,

Dick Cheney helps his cousin (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

(Updated below.)

With new friends like John Bolton, who recently praised President Obama’s targeted killing policy as “consistent with and really derived from the Bush administration approach to the War on Terror,” Obama needs some old-fashioned enemies. Just in time, Dick Cheney breaks his months of silence with a slashing, over-the-top speech denouncing Obama’s national security nominees as “second-rate” and charging, again, that he’s making the country less safe.

“The performance now of Barack Obama as he staffs up the national security team for the second term is dismal,” Cheney said in comments to about 300 members of the Wyoming Republican Party reported by the Associated Press on Sunday.

“Frankly, what he has appointed are second-rate people,” he said, for the positions of secretary of state, secretary of defense and CIA director — John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and John Brennan, to be precise.

Predictably the top neocon had the toughest words for Defense nominee Hagel, even though they’re both Republicans. Cheney joined the realm of conspiracy theorists by suggesting that Obama picked Hagel so he has “a Republican that he can use to take the heat for what he plans to do to the Department of Defense.” That’s a new one.

You’d like to think old five deferments Cheney could muster a tiny bit more respect for the twice-wounded Vietnam War veteran Hagel. But you’d be disappointed. He also might have noted that Brennan, who ought to be Obama’s most controversial nominee but is not, served as director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Bush and Cheney.

Cheney criticizing Obama is nothing new: He made news by attacking the president-elect a week before his inauguration in 2009, telling the PBS NewsHour’s Jim Lehrer that Obama would “put the nation at risk” if he ended torture as he promised. Cheney used to regularly go on about Obama being soft on terror, often using Politico the way Sarah Palin uses her Facebook page, to make substance-free charges without being challenged.

After Obama presided over the killing of Osama bin Laden, we heard less from Cheney for a while, but he did pop up on the Daily Caller to celebrate the anniversary of Sept. 11 last year by blasting Obama for taking sole credit for killing bin Laden, as well as charging that he regularly missed intelligence briefings. It’s progress, in a way, that Cheney’s latest broadsides came at a meeting of his home-state GOP, not on a big national stage. (And even as he attacked Kerry, both of Wyoming’s GOP senators, in attendance, voted to confirm the Massachusetts Democrat.)

Cheney calling anyone “second rate” on national security is rich: This is the man who falsely claimed there were ties between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 and led the charge to convince the world Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which it did not. He claimed the U.S. would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq; instead we got bogged down in an unwinnable war. His chief of staff Scooter Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison for his role in outing CIA operative Valerie Plame. (Bush commuted his sentence.)

It’s fascinating that Cheney came out of his hiding place the same week President Bush had his email hacked and copies of the president’s intriguing self-portraits circulated on the Web. While Bush’s art suggests a man engaged in some introspection – some folks have wondered if the portraits of him in the bath and shower suggest an attempt to cleanse himself of his worst decisions as president – Cheney just keeps spewing hatred. Even his new, taxpayer-funded heart can’t change him.

During the 2008 campaign Obama liked to joke that genealogists had found that Cheney was a distant cousin on his mother’s side. Obama expressed wry disappointment, confiding that he’d hoped he’d find he was related to someone famous he admired, only to learn of the Cheney connection. But maybe Cheney’s doing his cousin a good turn by reminding us that there’s distance between his national security policies and the previous administration. Chuck Hagel and John Kerry certainly would never serve in a Bush-Cheney administration. Luckily for the country, those days are behind us.

Update: The New York Times’s Brian Stelter just Tweeted that CBS has a “big exclusive” with Cheney that will be aired Tuesday. (He’ll repeat his claim that Obama picked Hagel so that a Republican will be blamed for doing “serious, serious damage to our military capabilities.” Stelter is generally a good reporter, but I’m not sure why he’s breathlessly hailing a Charlie Rose interview with Cheney as big media news: Cheney is a jobless former vice president who’s been wrong about everything, and who has criticized Obama since before he became president. That he’s still hailed as a newsmaker tells us only bad things about the news industry.

Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America." More Joan Walsh.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 34 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
138 points139 points | 4 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
99 points100 points | comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
36 points37 points | 8 comments
vote
Revenge editing on Wikipedia: The unmasking of a writer who took advantage of online anonymity to pursue vendettas with other writers
13 points14 points | 3 comments
vote
In Montana, dark money brings down a judicial candidate
10 points11 points | 5 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations