Republican Crime Syndicate – aka the Bush Admin.

This is amusing:

Wallace pointed out that Cheney had eight years to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and failed to do it.

“You and President Bush, the Bush-Cheney administration, dealt with Iran for eight years, and I think it was fair to say that there was never any real, serious military threat,” Wallace noted. “Iran went from zero known centrifuges in operation to more than 5,000.”

“So in fairness, didn’t you leave — the Bush-Cheney administration — leave President Obama with a mess?” the Fox News host asked.

“I don’t think of it that way,” Cheney replied. “There was military action that had an impact on the Iranians, it was when we took down Saddam Hussein. There was a period of time when they stopped their program because they were scared that what we did to Saddam, we were going to do to them next.”

“But the centrifuges went from zero to 5,000,” Wallace pressed.

“Well, they may have well have gone but that happened on Obama’s watch, not on our watch,” Cheney wrongly insisted.

“No, no, no,” Wallace fired back. “By 2009, they were at 5,000.”

“Right,” Cheney grumbled. “But I think we did a lot to deal with the arms control problem in the Middle East.”

I seriously think Cheney is suffering from pumphead and dementia at this point. In the past, his lies would be passable and crafted with enough deft that reporters could move along, but he has since passed that stage and now his only argument is “things were better when we were in charge.” That’s it. That’s all he’s got.

And one more time- Iran wasn’t scared into not pursuing a weapons program, they were encouraged to continue to develop one because of the invasion of Iraq. As one of the three countries in the so-called axis of evil, they saw what happened to Iraq, a country that stopped pursuing WMD and destroyed most of theirs to make us happy, they saw what didn’t happen to the nuclear armed North Korea that continues to develop WMD unabated for the most part, and made the decision any despotic regime would. The Bush administration incentivized having nuclear weapons. You can argue the Iranian regime is evil, but they aren’t stupid.

In other Iran news, this is a big deal:

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, announced on Sunday that she will support the nuclear agreement with Iran that has roiled many in her Florida district.

“I’ll be casting my vote to support the deal and if necessary sustain the president’s veto,” she told Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on CNN. While she called it a “gut-wrenching” decision-making process that caused her “angst and pause,” she concluded that the agreement would “put Iran years away from being a threshold nuclear state.”

The congresswoman choked up emotionally as she talked about the difficulty of the decision as a “Jewish mother” and the first Jewish woman elected to the House from Florida.

“There’s nothing more important to me as a Jew than to ensure that Israel’s existence is there throughout our generations,” she said.

She added, “There is no way that we would be able to ensure that better than approving this deal.”

In a separate interview, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell endorsed the agreement as well, calling it “a pretty good deal” that includes a “very vigorous” inspection system and imposes significant restrictions on Iran.

“These are remarkable changes,” Mr. Powell, who broke with Republicans to vote for Mr. Obama in 2008 and 2012, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “And so we have stopped this highway race that they were going down — and I think that’s very, very important.”

Big not in the numbers sense, but big because it was a politically difficult vote for her. As to Powell, who cares what he thinks.

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