Fox News Host To Dick Cheney: ‘History Has Proven You Got Iraq Wrong’
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney didn’t get the warm reception he was probably expecting on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show last night:
FOX News’ Megyn Kelly had some tough questions for former Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday night, after he and his daughter, Liz, offered a scathing review of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
“In your op-ed [in the Wall Street Journal], you write as follows: ‘Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” Kelly said on her show “The Kelly File.” “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well sir.”
Kelly then began listing shortcomings of the Bush administration, pointing out Cheney’s statements that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that the U.S. forces would be considered liberators and that Iraqi insurgency was “in the throes” in 2005.
Cheney responded that invading Iraq was “the right thing” and that it would have been “irresponsible for us not to act.”
“You’ve got to go back and look at the track record,” Cheney said. “We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction. … Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to.”
In the op-ed published Tuesday, the Cheneys wrote that President Barack Obama “seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch” with his foreign policy. The article has drawn scathing criticism, as people have labeled Cheney, which Kelly referred to, as “the man who helped lead us into Iraq in the first place.”
Referencing one of these harsh responses, Kelly quoted The Washington Post, which wrote “There is not a single person in America … who has been more wrong and shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.”
“The suggestion is that you caused this mess,” Kelly said. “What say you?”
Here’s the video:
It wasn’t the kind of interview Cheney would likely get on MSNBC, but it certainly wasn’t a laudatory celebration either.
Megyn Kelly is a sharp lady, he probably should have gone on Hannity if he wanted an easy interview.
Cheney…
Reality…
Ms Kelly knows how to ask a difficult question – be simple and direct.
Kudos to Megyn Kelly. I thought I’d never say that.
@C. Clavin: And add to that top Bush administration advisor Richard Haas’s statement that the timing for attack was a war of choice and we could have waited months or years. We could have let Blix do his job and discover there were no WMD. I wonder why they didn’t wait for that.
Good for her.
Uh oh. They’re going to have to start making sure Megyn and Shepard stop talking together in the lunch room.
This situation is similar to the “Nixon goes to China” situation. Just as only a Republican could have opened up relations with China, only a conservative could ask that question of Cheney. A liberal could not have asked the question and not been renditioned to a detention camp in Oklahoma. Megyn Kelly however ….
I can’t read or listen to a word Cheney says without getting agita. That asshole could be reading “Green Eggs and Ham” and I would see red.
A key point. Bush had actually succeeded in backing Saddam into a corner. Really, all he had to do was let the inspection process work. The magnitude of the blunders they made is just stunning.
I have to give Cheney some credit for having massive stones to blithely insist that they got it right and it is all Obama’s fault. Of course “day is night, black is white” is SOP in modern conservative politics.
A man who is guilty of war crimes, of torture, of subverting the integrity of the military’s ethical system, of lying, of destroying Colin Powell as an afterthought, of harming this country in ways we will take decades to recover from, is still being interviewed on national TV.
The man should be in prison.
@Ron Beasley: “Megyn Kelly is a sharp lady, he probably should have gone on Hannity if he wanted an easy interview. ”
She a Fox News anchor; she follows the party line. Word must have come down from Ailes.
@Barry:
She a Fox News anchor; she follows the party line. Word must have come down from Ailes.
I suspect the Republican powers that be are aware of how toxic these clowns are to the American public. They are worried that if Rumsfield and Cheney are front and center during the next presidential election a whole lotta people are going to have a real hard time voting for another Republican.
The Cheneys have a nerve, don’t they? Cheney was one of the authors of one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in many decades. This blunder that didn’t “just happen” but was made by the likes of Cheney who massively underestimated the troops we would need, sold us pie-in-the-sky estimates for how much it would cost and underplayed ethnic tensions. Now they’re coming out not with a policy but with vague campaign-style assertions that we need to do things differently. No explanation as to how except a lot more military spending.
Honestly, there have got to be other people with opinions than these idiots.
You all are giving Kelly far too much credit for a couple of decent questions at the open of that interview. Later on she asked:
And:
And this was her just the day before:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/megyn-kelly-the-obama-presidency-is-imploding/
Keep in mind she’s supposed to be one of Fox’s “straight” news anchors.
Another thing that comes to mind is how hard would it have been to bring Brent Scowcroft in to help deal with the situation, or perceived situation in Iraq? That is a lot of talent to leave on the sidelines. If I remember the story correctly, Bush ’41 & Scowcroft developed the successful core Gulf 1 strategy during a rowboat jaunt off kennebunkport.
The fact that they failed to do this, and apparently kept GHW pretty much out of the loop tells me that they wanted war with Iraq from the very beginning, regardless of the actual situation on the ground. 9.11 just happened to provide the necessary political climate. Voices of reason/moderation were neither sought or welcomed.
I always thought that Cheney and W should have been grandfathered in for an automatic third term. Stipulation being that they serve it in Iraq on the front lines in a couple of FEMA trailers. In fact the third term would be mandatory and they would have to stay there til all US Troops were back home.
I would not have given them the choice to retire to the Hunting Lodge so soon.
@michael reynolds: “The man should be in prison.”
(donning tinfoil accoutrements)
I think we literally have to wait for GHW Bush to pass. The criminal indictments otherwise write themselves. I don’t think Bar has the pull to stop grand juries alone.
(/dta)
The only other hat-tip for Kelley I’ve witnessed was the T.V. goldmine of Karl Rove melting down on set when those pesky coal miners did not show up in Ohio to usher in Romney’s landslide. In her descent into the Counting Dungeons of FOX, at one point she stopped and said, “this is where the mic cut out during rehearsal.”
If a camera is pointed at it, it’s staged. Just don’t tell Karl Rove.
Kelley’s follow-up with the war criminal was otherwise completely lacking. It wasn’t stellar. Perhaps unexpected to some, but not her best day as a front-line lie-piercing investigative journalist.
I’m not impressed. It’s a tougher question than Hannity would have asked, but it was still very restrained. It’s nothing like the
deposition“interview” of Hillary Clinton the other night.@anjin-san: “The fact that they failed to do this, and apparently kept GHW pretty much out of the loop tells me that they wanted war with Iraq from the very beginning, regardless of the actual situation on the ground. 9.11 just happened to provide the necessary political climate. Voices of reason/moderation were neither sought or welcomed. ”
One of the striking characteristics of the Bush II crowd was that every single one of Bush I’s subordinates disgraced themselves very thoroughly.
That crowd was worth nothing without adult leadership. They follow their king, and when the new king was an idiot, they followed him to disaster.
BTW, the other comments are backing up my theory – Megyn is 100% an Roger Ailes party line Fox News maggot. It’s just that sometimes Roger Ailes’ party line requires certain Republicans to be slapped down.
Too bad we can’t do to Cheney what the South African apartheid gov’t could do to its critics – ban them. . A banned person could be confined to his home or immediate surroundings, prohibited from meeting with more than one person at a time (other than his family), forced to resign any offices in any organization, prohibited from speaking publicly or writing for any publication, and barred from certain areas, buildings, and institutions, such as law courts, schools, and newspaper offices. Moreover, the banned person could not be quoted in any publication. The effect was to render the banned person a public nonentity.
Cheney is like the 3 pack a day chain smoker who blames his cancer on the doctor who diagnosed the ailment.
Someone on Fox news going after Cheney is exactly like the old National Enquirer publishing a legitimate story on, say, a bank scandal. It is so unlikely that the institution has decided to go into serious journalism that you would be better off looking for connections between the publisher and the subject.
Who’s “we” Zippy? United States Government?
You are aware if “we” could do that to Dick Cheney “we” could do it to you too!
Q=Quick Thinker?