Sean Hannity’s pathological hatred for our democratically elected president was on full view tonight as he got together with Liz Cheney for an Iran-nuke smear session the two would almost certainly condemn if a Democrat said anything like this about a Republican president. Oh, and a hilarious bout of amnesia over the role that Daddy Dick Cheney played in empowering Iran in the first place.
Actually, there was even more amnesia going on. Hannity suddenly “forgot” how he used to think his kind of rhetoric emboldens our enemies and undermines our troops.
HANNITY: We have a president that wants to give the Iranians nuclear weapons in spite of their threats to the United States, ‘Death to America,’ ‘Wipe Israel off the map.’ A pathological hatred towards Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel and yet the Jordanians and Egyptians, when they face terror, they fight it with a fierceness and our president hears about the beheading of one American and 30 seconds later, he’s on a golf course. So when you put all of that together, what is this going to look like in two years?
Don't worry, Hannity. We’ll save this quote just in case a Republican is elected president and you suddenly “forget” again.
Hannity’s “question” about Iran was posed to Liz Cheney, daughter of “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” Dick Cheney. And whose “mistake” cost 4,500 American lives, tens of thousands of American injuries, a couple of trillion dollars and 100,000 – 500,000 Iraqi deaths.
But Liz seems about as bothered about that as Daddy Dick, which is to say not at all. Perhaps she’s just too busy looking forward to a new war.
CHENEY: It is hard to overstate how dangerous it is and how dangerous it’s gonna be in a couple of years from now. …He (Obama) is so desperate for a deal with Iran, that he’s also willing to align our interests with theirs across the region.
Aligning our interests with Iran across the region? Nothing aligned our interests with Iran in the region like Daddy Cheney’s toppling of Saddam Hussein (under false pretenses).
In the Winter 2007-08 issue of Survival, the Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter and Malou Innocent wrote:
By deposing Saddam Hussein, the United States radically altered the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. Since the early 1940s, power had been dispersed among Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United States, Iran and the Soviet Union (and its successor, the Russian Federation). The most intense manoeuvring within this multipolar balance occurred between Iraq and Iran, with neither side achieving a clear advantage. That dynamic has now changed. Even before the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iran possessed a budding nuclear programme, the region’s largest population, an expansive ballistic-missile arsenal and, through sponsor- ship, influence over the Lebanese Shia group Hizbullah. The George W. Bush administration and neo-conservative proponents of the war overlooked these assets, and America’s removal of Saddam Hussein as the principal strategic counterweight to Iran paved the way for an expansion of Iran’s influence.
Hannity and Cheney may want to forget this inconvenient truth. We can't let them.
h/t Media Matters
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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