RUSH: Vice President Cheney was on the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, who had to sneak in under the guise of a group of critics, a question about the vice president's daughter. Blitzer said, “Your daughter, she's going to have a baby. A statement from someone representing Focus on the Family: ‘Mary Cheney's pregnancy raises the question of what's best for [churrin.] Just because it's possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn't mean it's best for the child.’ Do you want to respond to that?”
CHENEY: No, I don't.
BLITZER: She's a obviously a good daughter –
CHENEY: I'm delighted I'm about to have a sixth grandchildren, Wolf, and obviously I think the world of both my daughters, and all of my grandchildren -- and I think, frankly, you're out of line with that question.
REPORTER: I think all of us appreciate your daughter --
CHENEY: I think you're out of line.
RUSH: Would you like to hear a media montage reacting to this? Who do we have here? We've got Ann Curry of NBC, Soledad O'Brien of CNN, Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post, Amy Robach from MSNBC, and Democrat strategerist Mark Walsh talking about this.
CURRY: The vice president bristled during an interview.
O’BRIEN: Combative interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, things got pretty testy.
VANDEHEI: He's very in your face.
ROBACH: The vice president got visibly angry.
WALSH: Dick Cheney is a pompous, egocentric maniac.
RUSH: Right. Well, let's go back to September 24th, 2006.
CLINTON (Monatge): I'm being asked this on the Fox network. ABC just had a right-wing conservative running their little Pathway to 9/11, falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 Commission report. So you did Fox's bidding on this show, you did your nice little conservative hit job on me. You set this meeting up because you're going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch spoiled my work on climate change, and you came here under false pretenses, and you don't care. You falsely accuse me of giving aid and comfort to bin Laden because of what happened in Somalia. You intended, though, to move your bones by doing this first, which is perfectly fine. I always get these clever little political deals where they ask me one set of questions and the other guys another set.
RUSH: Okay, so here's Clinton, you all remember this, losing his cool, Chris Wallace, Fox News Sunday. Following, that was on September 24th, 2006, the Associated Press ran the story on September 27th, three days later. “Is It Cool to Lose Your Cool?” “That's one of the questions of the week as we evaluate and reevaluate Bill Clinton's finger pointing, knee poking interview with Chris Matthews on Fox. The first debate, of course, was whether Clinton had actually lost it, had a full-bore tantrum, one conservative columnist called it, or knew exactly what he was doing.” The piece goes on to analyze, is it okay to lose your cool on TV now when you're insulted? Is it okay to do it?
Just like when the lies got too many to count and remember the nineties, we got stories in the AP on how little white lies are actually healthy, they're good for us, they spare people's feelings. So here you got Clinton who was in your face and pointing his finger at Chris Wallace and doing a pretty good intimidation job -- well, he tried to. Cheney, calm, cool, collected and so forth, and the Drive-Bys are going nuts over how he lost his temper, he's a pompous, egocentric maniac; he got visibly angry. The contrast could not be more stark. We pick up now with the Blitzer-Cheney interview. Blitzer said, “Some of your good Republican friends in the Senate and in the House are now seriously questioning your credibility because of the blunders of the failures.”
CHENEY: Wolf, I simply don't accept the premise of your question. Remember with me what happened in Afghanistan. The United States was actively involved in Afghanistan in the eighties, supporting the effort against the Soviets. The Mujahideen prevailed, everybody walked away. And an Afghanistan within relatively short order the Taliban came to power, they created a safe haven for Al-Qaeda, training camps were established where some 20,000 terrorists during the late nineties, and out of that -- out of Afghanistan because we walked away and ignored it, we had the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the embassies in east Africa and 9/11, where the people trained and planned in Afghanistan for that attack and killed 3,000 Americans. That is what happens when we walk away from a situation like that in the Middle East.
RUSH: Does that sound like Cheney is standing up in righteous indignation and pointing his finger at Blitzer and demanding that he shut up and accusing them doing a hit piece, does it sound like that at all? No, it doesn't. Next question from Wolf Blitzer. “What if the Senate passes a resolution saying this is not a good idea? Will that stop you?”
CHENEY: It won't stop us, and it would be I think detrimental from the standpoint of the troops, as general Petraeus said yesterday. He was asked by Joe Lieberman, among others, in his testimony about this notion that somehow the Senate could vote overwhelming for him, send him on his new assignment and then pass a resolution at the same time and say but we don't agree with the mission you've been given.
RUSH: Right. By the way, we had a caller call, couldn't stay on the air, got a new name for Senator Hagel in Nebraska, we got General Petraeus and we got Senator Betrayus, new name for Senator Hagel. Here’s another question from Blitzer, “Here's the problem that you have. The administration, credibility in Congress with the American public, because of the mistakes, because of the previous statements, the last throes, the comment you made a year and a half ago, the insurgency was in its last throes. How do you build up that credibility because so many of these Democrats and a lot of Republicans now are saying that they don't believe you anymore.”
CHENEY: Well, Wolf, if the history books were written by people who have so eager to write off this effort to declare it a failure, including many of our friends in the media, the situation obviously would have been over a long time ago. Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes. It is hard, it is difficult. It's one of the toughest things any president has to. It's easy to stick your finger in the air and figure out which way the winds are blowing and then try to get in front of the herd. This president doesn't work that way.
RUSH: And then they have this exchange about Hillary.
BLITZER: Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?
CHENEY: No, I don't.
BLITZER: Why?
CHENEY: Because she's a Democrat. I don't agree with her philosophically and from a policy standpoint.
BLITZER: Do you think she will be president, though?
CHENEY: I don't.
RUSH: Sound angry? Sound like an ego maniacal pompous buffoon as he was called by Democrat strategist there? And yet with Bill Clinton losing it, we got stories on, “Maybe this is cool, maybe it's time for this kind of thing to stop this bullying tactic that Fox News is so famous for.” Anyway, you can't get more direct than that.
"Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?"
"No, I don't."
"Why?"
"Because she's a Democrat."
END TRANSCRIPT
