Say what you will about Dick Cheney — and I’ve said more than my share in recent months — he’s a serious politician with serious ideas.
OK, so I cannot stand the former vice president’s constant carping about the administration that succeeded the one in which he was a key player. I cannot stomach that he cannot keep his trap shut about foreign policy issues, as he is undermining President Obama and Vice President Biden.
But this serious man said a serious thing about impeaching the president.
He calls such talk a “distraction.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/dick-cheney-sarah-palin-impeachment-distraction-108944.html?hp=r4
Cheney was referring specifically to an unserious politician’s talk about impeachment. That would be the former half-term Republican Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who’s weighed in with some notion that the president needs to be impeached. She hasn’t specified the high crimes and misdemeanors of which he is supposedly guilty.
It doesn’t matter, frankly. There aren’t any misdeeds that rise to anything close to an impeachable offense.
Still, Cheney is right to call down his GOP colleague — if only gently. He said he likes the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee. Cheney says she has a right to her opinion, which of course is quite correct. It’s just that she’s wrong on almost everything that flies out of her mouth.
For that matter, so is Cheney.
On this issue, though, he is right … to the extent he has spoken out at all about impeaching Barack Obama.
Cheney told CNN: “I’m not prepared, at this point, to call for the impeachment of the president. I think he is the worst president of my lifetime. I fundamentally disagree with him. I think he’s doing a lot of things wrong. I’m glad to see House Republicans are challenging him, at least legally, at this point, but I think that gets to be a bit of a distraction just like the impeachment of Bill Clinton did.”
He’s not going to give President Obama any kind of a break, to be sure. That’s expected.
Still, he’s trying to quell the nut-case talk among those on the right wing of his once-great political party. I’ll give him a modicum of credit for that.