World News Korner

Outgoing White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has just about the best response possible to criticism from Dick Cheney on Obama's handling of Iraq.

Courtesy of Mediaite:

During his final briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney got in a jab at Dick Cheney after the former vice president wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many” with regards to Iraq and Middle East policy.

“Which president was he talking about?” Carney zinged as ABC reporter Jon Karl read off the quote, prompting laughter from the packed room. “I believe he was talking about President Obama,” Karl joked back.

Carney ultimately settled with this response: “He’s entitled to his opinion.”

The idea that anybody should seriously listen to anything Cheney has to say about Iraq is being universally dismissed.

From the New York Times:

This, from the man who helped lead us into this trumped-up war, searching for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, a war in which some 4,500 members of the American military were killed, many thousands more injured, and that is running a tab of trillions of dollars.

To the Washington Post:

When it comes to being wrong about Iraq, Dick Cheney has been in a class by himself. It was Cheney who said, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

It was Cheney who said: “it’s been pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta “did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.”

It was Cheney who said: “we do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon”

It was Cheney who said in 2005: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

All those things, and many more, were false. 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 even, believe it or not, over at Fox News:

“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.”

And while all of that is good, it is really not good enough.

Good enough would be seeing Dick Cheney giving interviews from behind bars.

Good enough would be seeing the entire Bush Administration prosecuted for war crimes.

Good enough would be the Republican party admitting publicly that they helped lie a nation into war and lose their standing as a political party of worth in this country.

It would not bring back the thousands of dead American soldiers, nor the hundreds of thousands dead Iraqis, but at least it might do something to keep such a travesty from ever happening again.

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