April 30, 2016

I totally missed this video when it was released last September. The White House, yes, the real White House with the Obama Administration in it, released this video when Dick Cheney took to the Fox News airwaves and The American Enterprise Institute's podium to denounce the Iran deal and attempt to influence Congress to reject the treaty.

Which is kind of ironic, given that this is the same Cheney who as a 1980's Congressman thought his colleagues should just butt out as Reagan sold weapons to Iran in the Iran Contra Scandal.

The video above is nothing short of unprecedented for three reasons:

One, it is almost unheard of that a sitting President will call out a former Vice President, even one from the other party, for being wrong about issues while that person was Vice President. There is a collegiality rule that if you don't have something nice to say about your predecessors, you say nothing.

Two, it is unprecedented that a former Vice President would go on a media spree attempting to interfere with the negotiated treaty of a sitting President with a foreign government. Again, there are rules that the sitting President speaks for the nation in his or her dealings with foreign governments. You might speak privately with colleagues to give them your off-the-record opinions, but speeches and televised interviews? No.

And finally, there has never been an administration that so obviously botched, lied, twisted, and invented an actual war where Americans were killed, than the Bush/Cheney administration. At least in Vietnam we knew the communists, our claimed enemy, was manipulating the North Vietnamese. We had no indication that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11, and only falsified intelligence that he had WMD's. Those two reasons for war were completely and utterly false.

It's a toss-up which is more shocking: that the Obama White House called out Dick Cheney in this way, or that they had to.

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