If you’re being generous you can read this as a critique of policy, but I’m not so generous and I believe it was a coded wink and a nod that the president himself may be a terrorist sympathizer.
Dick “Dick” Cheney spoke to House Republicans today and, according to a report from The Daily Beast, he made these accusations.
According to Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, Cheney said Obama “has actually done things that have supported the Muslim Brotherhood.” The former vice president then went on to name the Muslim Brotherhood as “the beginning of all the Islamist groups that we’re dealing with now like Hamas and ISIS.”
In Fleming’s account, Cheney said that by “facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood…our policies have been exactly opposite to where they should be.”
This is an inflammatory thing for Cheney to say, but it’s also ironic.
The objective of Cheney’s speech was to convince House Republicans that they should support military action against ISIS, something the president has already ordered and carried out. That is to say he made the case for supporting the president’s actions by attacking the president’s actions. Furthermore, one could easily and justifiably make the argument that Cheney’s policies created the toxic environment we face today.
Cheney reportedly received a standing ovation from House Republicans for his comments.