Republican Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), an Iraq war veteran and a hawk on foreign policy, endorsed former vice-president Dick Cheney as John Boehner‘s replacement as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
“Look, these are trying times for our nation. It’s important to have a steady hand on the helm during times like this. I think experience really counts in a matter like this. I think House leadership experience really matters,” Cotton said in an interview with Politico‘s congressional newsletter Huddle. “And as you know the speaker doesn’t have to be a member of the House: So therefore, Vice President Cheney for speaker.”
When pressed if he was serious, Cotton responded: “He’s a man of the House, he says that himself,” Cotton said.
Cheney spent a decade in the House of Representatives representing Wyomings’ at-large congressional district for a decade, where he was reelected five times rising to the position of House Minority Whip before being selected by President George H.W. Bush to be the Secretary of Defense, a position he held for a majority of Bush’s term from 1989 to 1993.
Of course, Tom Cotton needs no introduction – he’s the traitor who authored that letter to the Iranian leadership in an attempt to undermine the nuclear deal. To make matters worse, he met with a group of defense contractors the day after penning that mutinous letter. World leaders condemned Cotton and his letter; CBS News delivered a knock-out blow to Cotton with one word during an appearance on on “Face The Nation.” Even Fox News host Megyn Kelly came after Cotton and his ridiculous letter, grilling him during a March appearance on The Kelly File and ultimately dismissing him with a “pffft, whatever.“
Turning to Dick Cheney, even conservatives are pushing back against the pro-war Republican who has been hitting the right-wing news circuit lately promoting his new book and squawking about how President Obama‘s nuclear deal with Iran will end civilization as we know it.
A great case in point point is last year when Megyn Kelly shredded Cheney in a June 2014 interview in what Fox News later described as “an accountability moment for the ex-veep.”
Kelly began by paraphrasing liberal Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman, who reported earlier that week about Cheney and Iraq:
There is not a single person in America — not Bill Kristol, not Paul Wolfowitz, not Don Rumsfeld, no pundit, not even President Bush himself — who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.
And now, as the cascade of misery and death and chaos he did so much to unleash rages anew, Cheney has the unadulterated gall to come before the country and tell us that it’s all someone else’s fault, and if we would only listen to him then we could keep America safe forever. How dumb would we have to be to listen?
Kelly then asked: “The suggestion is that you caused this mess, Mr. Vice President. What say you?” As Fox News reported at the time, Cheney gave his standard defense of the wars, replying:
I think we went into Iraq for very good reasons. I think when we left office, we had a situation in Iraq that was very positive… What happened was that Barack Obama came to office, and instead of negotiating a stay behind agreement, he basically walked away from it.
Kelly came back and slammed Cheney, telling him:
But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well in Iraq, sir. You said there were no doubts Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would greeted as liberators. You said the Iraq insurgency was in the last throes back in 2005. And you said that after our intervention, extremists would have to, quote, ‘rethink their strategy of Jihad.’ Now with almost a trillion dollars spent there with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say, you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?
Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, sat down for an interview with Thom Hartmann, host of of RT’s “The Big Picture,” to discuss Dick Cheney‘s opposition to the Iran Agreement, telling him:
Dick Cheney should go away. Dick Cheney has become a profane obscene blemish on the American reputation. Dick Cheney in 1998 as CEO of Halliburton, for example, said dramatically that sanctions don’t work. He wanted the sanctions on Iran lifted. He wanted to do business with Iran. Now all of a sudden, Dick Cheney is not just for sanctions – he is for discarding the Iran agreement and essentially going back to sanctions, even more draconian sanctions. Dick Cheney is in a word an “idiot.”
Then there are those who continue to push for Cheney’s arrest and conviction as a war criminal, such as Thomas Buergenthal, who served as a judge at the International Court of Justice at the Hague for ten years until his retirement in 2010, is considered by many the world’s most distinguished living specialist in international human rights law.
Newsweek reports that, a natural diplomat, Buergenthal “occasionally finds that his instinct for tact deserts him.” During a July interview with Robert Chalmers the conversation turned to Cheney and the possibility of his prosecution as a war criminal at the International Criminal Court. Burgenthal told Chalmers that “I think – yes – that it will happen.”
Some of us have long thought that Cheney, and a number of CIA agents who did what they did in those so-called black holes [overseas torture centers] should appear before the ICC. We [in the USA] could have tried them ourselves. I voted for Obama but I think he made a great mistake when he decided not to instigate legal proceedings against some of these people. I think – yes – that it will happen.
You can watch Col. Wilkerson’s interview with Thom Hartmann, below:
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