Dick Cheney got a pass on The O’Reilly Factor both for his war crimes and his misbegotten Iraq war under false pretenses. Instead, he was treated like an elder statesman.

Bill O’Reilly warmed up the audience for Cheney and his daughter, Liz, with a Talking Points commentary about the Iran nuclear deal. “No sane person thinks this Iranian nuke deal benefits the west,” O’Reilly said, setting the tone in advance.

When the Cheneys came on, immediately following the Talking Points segment, Dick Cheney bragged about his own Middle East mojo that he suggested Obama should copy:

DICK CHENEY: I’m saying (Obama's) weak. He conveyed that sense of weakness…

Remember, Bill, how we have dealt with proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East before. 1981 Saddam Hussein had a program going …the Israelis took it out, military force. 1991, we went in with Desert Storm, we shut down his nuclear program then: military force. When we went in in ’03 and took down Saddam Hussein, himself, one of the byproducts of that was Muammar Qaddafi saw what we did to him and he immediately surrendered his nuclear materials. …And then we went and we got A.Q. Khan because he’s the guy who had supplied the Libyans with the nuclear materials.

…The fact of the matter is there’s a well-established pattern in the Middle East of dealing with these problems through the use of force or the realistic threat.

So there you go. Rather than give peace a chance, Dick Cheney would rather start another war, or at least threaten one.

O’Reilly never said a word about the 500,000 needless deaths caused by Cheney’s last war. Nor the fact that Cheney is a convicted war criminal over the Bush administration's torture program. Maybe that's because there were too few fetuses.

[Ed. Note: The transcript for O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo is here if you don't want to watch.]