By Richard Hébert

HAS there ever been a grumpier old man on the American political stage than Dick Cheney?  He’s grumpier than Hollywood’s most famous “Grumpy Old Men,” Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon.  He’d be just as big a joke as they, if he weren’t so dead wrong about so much, or as his successor Joe Biden benevolently put it, so “misinformed or misinforming.” 

Cheney’s latest “misinformation” blitz came during ABC’s This Week when he attacked the Obama Administration’s “mindset” in dealing with terrorism and its ban on torture as somehow an invitation to more 9/11-scale terrorist attacks.  “I was a big supporter” of torture, the ex-vice president confessed, lest there be any doubt.

He also saw little to applaud in Obama’s conduct of the Iraq war, grousing that Obama should “thank” Bush for the troop surge.  Perhaps, but facts are, unfortunately, stubborn things.  That particular war appears to be going considerably better during Obama’s watch than it did under Bush-Cheney. 

For one thing, our troops are coming home.  We now have fewer than 100,000 in Iraq for the first time since the 2003 invasion.  The 97,000 currently there will be halved to about 50,000 by August, with all of them home by the end of next year.

Meanwhile, the war Bush-Cheney all but abandoned in Afghanistan to go chasing after imaginary WMD in Iraq also appears to be going fairly well.  Even Cheney grudgingly credits Obama for that.

The Taliban is now under siege in its last stronghold, Marja in southern Afghanistan.  The fighting continues, but the most recent reports say Taliban fighters are reduced to sniper fire and ambushes by small squads.

Perhaps even more significant, three of the Afghan Taliban’s top military leaders have been captured and are sitting in jail – two “shadow” governors from northern provinces and the reputed top commander of military operations, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar – along with up to nine Al Qaeda-linked militants, all the result of cooperation between Pakistani and American intelligence officers, a level of cooperation not seen since U.S. relations with Pakistan went into deep freeze in 2004.

American troops are now in their ninth year in Afghanistan.  Across those years it’s hard to recall any comparable spate of favorable news.  Let’s also remember that when Bush-Cheney decided to cut-and-run from Afghanistan to go chasing moonbeams in Iraq they had Osama bin Laden on the run.  He’s still out there.

So much for the wars Obama inherited from Cheney and friends.  What about his “mindset” that’s supposedly crippling our war against terrorism?

More stubborn facts.  Consider the trail of misinformed opinion Cheney left in his wake before Sunday’s revived grumpiness.

Cheney on closing the Guantánamo prison:  “It’s easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantánamo. But it’s tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America’s national security.” (May 21, 2009)

Fact:  Guantánamo and the interrogation practices that went on there did not serve justice; instead, as Exhibit A in the recruiting of future terrorists, it added to our national insecurity.

Cheney on torture:  “I know specifically of reports…that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process (using torture) and what the consequences were for the country.”  (April 2009)

Fact:  The CIA made those reports public in August.  They showed nothing of the kind.  As Jane Mayer of The New York Times reported, “(S)omeone at the CIA…conceded to me that ‘we could have gotten the same information from tea and crumpets.’”

Fact:  Before he was captured, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed boasted to Al Jazeera that he had masterminded 9/11.  No one had to torture it out of him.  In fact, he later told the International Committee of the Red Cross that he’d lied to his torturers to tell them what they wanted to hear so they’d stop the torture, thereby sending them on wild goose chases that may have actually put American lives at greater risk.

Sen. John McCain, who knows torture up-close-and-personal, summed it up best last spring:  “I think these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq….  I think that the ability of us to work with our allies was harmed. And I believe that information, according to the FBI and others, could have been gained” without using torture.

Cheney on civilian trials:  He harrumphs about reading terrorist suspects their Miranda rights and trying them in civilian courts as indicative that Obama isn’t fighting a “war on terror.”

Fact:  The underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria, who was read his rights, is talking – without torture.

Fact:  Ramzi Yousef, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was convicted in federal court in 1997 and 1998 of plotting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the bombing of an airliner.  He is serving a life sentence without parole in a super-maximum prison in Colorado.

Fact:  Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was tried in Federal Court.  He is serving a life sentence without parole, also in a super-max prison.

Fact:  Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian terrorist, is also serving a life sentence, convicted in federal court in 1995 for planning bomb attacks against New York City landmarks

Apparently our civilian justice system is quite capable of dealing with terrorists while demonstrating to the world at large that we uphold the rule of law and honestly do believe in “justice for all.”  Why is Cheney so afraid of our system of justice, enshrined in the Constitution he swore to “support and defend”?

Of course, it isn’t only Cheney who is laughable if not dangerously misinformed (or misinforming) about the state of our nation. It’s also the Grand Old Hypocrisy Party to which he belongs. 

As this is being written, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is holding its annual meeting in Washington to crow about Republican resurgence even as the punditocracy continues writing the Democrats’ obituary.  No one seems to be paying much attention to still more stubborn facts, to wit:

The stimulus.  Not one House Republicans and only three Senate Republicans voted for the stimulus bill, railing against it as “socialism” and pork-barrel spending that wouldn’t create a single job.

Meanwhile, many of those selfsame Republicans – 116 representatives, senators and governors by one count – were simultaneously writing to federal agencies begging for stimulus money for their states and districts and are elbow-to-elbow at ribbon-cuttings taking credit for bringing home the “pork” they voted against. 

That Hypocrisy Hall of Shame includes such Republican bigwigs as Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (Ohio), Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (Virginia), erstwhile presidential candidate Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tennessee), and Sen. Richard Shelby (Alabama), ranking member of both the Senate Appropriations and Banking committees, who blackmailed the government out of $400 million in stimulus cash for a pet rocket program in his state.

Jobs.  They rant and rave that Obama has done nothing to create jobs in this Republican-spawned recession, yet Roll Call reports that Republican leaders met with some 100 lobbyists and promised to filibuster the jobs bill when it comes to the floor, even though they have themselves proposed many of the same measures, such as tax breaks for small businesses that create new jobs.

Deficit reduction.  How Republicans love to beat the drums about deficits, howling about government spending in a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s rant that he rode all the way to the White House.  When a bill came up to create a bipartisan commission to recommend deficit reduction solutions that would require an up-or-down vote, 23 Republicans opposed it, enough to doom it, admittedly thanks to some break-away Democrats as well.

Seven of those Republicans had previously co-sponsored the bill they voted against.  Had those seven stuck by their principles, a filibuster-proof super majority would have created the commission.  Instead, Obama is forced to form his own commission by executive order, one that won’t be able to force a vote on its recommendations.

With such a track record, it boggles the mind why any thinking voter would want to swallow this stuff – from Cheney to Boehner to McConnell – and vote to reinstall their party in office.  But that’s just what the commentariat tells us lies ahead, facts be damned.