Dick Cheney’s White House feud

last updated 8 January 2015

Dick Cheney is doing President Obama a favor, said Chris Cillizza in The Washington Post. The former vice president said on CNN that Obama had made the country less safe. But the “deeply unpopular” Cheney should not be speaking for a Republican Party in need of repairing its “damaged image.” Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs' response wrote itself—“I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy,” he said.

“What on earth does Limbaugh have to do with this?” asked John Hinderaker in Power Line. If Gibbs keeps having “outer space moments” like the one when he called Cheney and Limbaugh part of a “Republican cabal,” the Democrats are the ones who’ll look bad. But maybe that’s preferable to having an honest discussion about how effective the Bush administration’s national security policies really were.

It’s hard to have an honest discussion as long as people refuse to ask Cheney hard questions, said Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic. CNN’s John King—“usually a fair and very well-informed reporter”—interviewed Cheney on the day “we found out that the International Red Cross unequivocally called the treatment of terror suspects by Cheney and Bush torture.” Why didn’t King ask Cheney about that?