Dick Cheney messes with Joe O'Biden

But but but you are not supposed to Mess With Joe ....

First, here is O'Biden, in all his glory:

Biden Knocks Cheney on Meet the Press [Daniel Foster]

In a pre-taped interview for NBC's Meet the Press, Vice President Joe Biden took shots at his predecessor, Dick Cheney, over the latter's criticism of Obama administration counterterror efforts.

Biden accused Cheney of attempting to "rewrite history" and suggested that in little over a year in office, the Obama administration has outstripped the counterterror successes of the Bush administration:

"Maybe he's not fully informed of what's going on. I mean, the progress we have made. There has never been as much emphasis and resources brought against Al Qaeda. The success rate exceeds anything that occurred in the last Administration. And they did their best."


Cheney Hits Back [Daniel Foster]

Appearing on ABC News' This Week today, former Vice President Dick Cheney did his part to make the Sunday morning political chat shows a battle of the Veeps.

Cheney responded with some charity to Biden's claims that the Obama administration was doing more to counter terrorism in Af/Pak and elsewhere than the Bush administration had, but took issue with Biden's claim that Iraq would become one of Obama's great successes. A partial transcript:

KARL: OK, before we get to Eric Holder, a couple more things from the vice president. He's been out responding preemptively to you. One thing he said we heard in the open, that he believes Iraq may ultimately prove to be one of the greatest achievements of the Obama administration.

CHENEY: Well, I — I guess I shouldn't be surprised by my friend, Joe Biden. I'm glad he now believes Iraq is a success. Of course, Obiden and — Obama and Biden campaigned from one end of the country to the other for two years criticizing our Iraq policy.

CHENEY: They opposed the surge that was absolutely crucial to our getting to the point we're at now with respect to Iraq. And for them to try to take credit for what's happened in Iraq strikes me as a little strange. I think if — if they had had their way, if we'd followed the policies they'd pursued from the outset or advocated from the outset, Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Baghdad today.

So if they're going to take credit for it, fair enough, for what they've done while they're there, but it ought to go with a healthy dose of "Thank you, George Bush" up front and a recognition that some of their early recommendations, with respect to prosecuting that war, we're just dead wrong.

He also said the administration was unprepared for dealing with the attempted Christmas Day attack:

KARL: OK, let's get to — you mentioned Eric Holder, the treatment of the Christmas Day underwear bomber. How do you think that case should have been dealt with?

CHENEY: I think the — the proper way to — to deal with it would have been to treat him as an enemy combatant. I think that was the right way to go.

The thing I learned from watching that process unfold, though, was that the administration really wasn't equipped to deal with the aftermath of an attempted attack against the United States in the sense that they didn't know what to do with the guy.

There was talk earlier after they'd dismantled the system we'd put in place for prisoner interrogation of high-value detainees. They'd gone out supposedly to create the HIG, high-value interrogation program, but in reality, it was not up and running at Christmastime when it should have been. It started months before that, to put that in place. They need a process, a set of institutions that they can fall back on. Admittedly, this is hard. We had a hard time dealing with this. You've got the Supreme Court on one side that — that is going to evaluate everything you do, and you've got to be careful with that. The Congress gets involved in it.

CHENEY: So I'm not saying it's an easy task, but by this point, when they've made all the decisions they've had, closed Guantanamo, end (ph) the high-value detainee program and so forth, I think those are all mistakes. Those were the tools we put in place to deal with this kind of situation. They should have had something to put in lieu of those programs, and it would look like they do not have — have that kind of capability yet.

Cheney said that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding," and that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques should have been "on the table" for Abdulmutallab:

CHENEY: I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table. Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army manual, which doesn't include those techniques. I think that's a mistake.