On Face the Nation today, Dick Cheney said that he chooses Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell when it comes to the debate about the future of the GOP.
"If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd choose Rush Limbaugh," Cheney said when asked about whose vision of the GOP he'd side with. "My impression was that Colin was no longer a Republican."
"I don't think the Republican Party ought to move far to the left," Cheney said. "The suggestion our Democratic friends always make is, 'Well, if you Republicans were just more like Democrats, you'd win elections.' Well, I don't buy that."
I'm glad Dick Cheney continues to put his face out there as a spokesmen for the "new" GOP and as a torture apologist, but this brief part of the show demonstrates that Cheney is more impressed with a peddler of GOP propaganda and entertainment than he is defending one of his own and a man who sold the Iraq war to the American people.
Cheney always got into it with Powell over foreign policy so it's not a shock that he would be outspoken against him either.
Powell wanted to stay the course that took the diplomatic route as BushCo. went after Iraq, but when Bush told him we were going to war he signed on without giving his honest opinion. Many people forget that Colin Powell didn't even want to go to the UN for a resolution when they all decided to go to war with Iraq, but since Blair told Bush to get UN approval, he was forced to give a presentation they hoped would swing the country and the world against Saddam. And that presentation has tarnished his record more than anything. It's very fitting. Woodward's book Plan of Attack, reveals all this in detail. And as Digby and Bob Somerby have written, we have to be careful how Colin Powell is described because he's had his hand in a lot of very bad things.
Colin Powell is not only not a war hero, he's actually implicated in war crimes from two different wars --- as one of the "White House Principals" who watched the CIA act out torture techniques for their approval and as one of the men who tried to cover up My Lai. (He was involved in Iran-Contra too.) And that's not even taking into account his pivotal role in energetically selling the Iraq war with bogus intelligence. Certainly, the man cannot be separated from Dick Cheney on that issue.
He was one of the most powerful people in the Bush administration and he failed time after time to step up and use his vast personal popularity to stop them or slow them down. He is, in fact, the worst chickensh*t of the bunch since he had a separate power center and a special authority as an ex-general. Cheney may have been the chief architect, but Powell was the chief salesman and cover artist.
