Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that President Obama has made the nation more vulnerable to terrorist attacks by rolling back many of the policies of the Bush/Cheney years.
The criticism came in a broad-based attack on Obama during the CNN news show, “State of the Union.”
Cheney said key elements of the Bush approach to terrorism were “absolutely essential” and had foiled subsequent plots after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Under Bush, he said, the United States fought terrorism as a war, not as a law enforcement problem.
“Now he (Obama) is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack,” Cheney said.
The White House did not respond.
Cheney also criticized Obama’s economic plan for battling the nation’s recession, saying Obama was using the crisis to institute more big government. He called it “one of the greatest expansions of federal control over the private economy, probably, in the history of the republic.”
Cheney praised Rush Limbaugh as a “good friend” who “does great work,” and said he disagreed strongly when former President George W. Bush refused to pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff, was convicted of perjury and obstructing justice in the Valerie Plame-CIA leak investigation.
Read a longer version of this story at LATimes.com.
