Great to have you with us, Rush Limbaugh on the most listened-to radio talk show ever.
Well, at least since the invention of TV, the EIB Network, great to have you here, and we are happy once again.
Welcome back to the program, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Mr. Cheney, we have a half hour with you today, and you're making the rounds.
I know that you were on the Today Show today.
Matt Lauer said to you that some people have called you the most divisive political figure in this country in a century.
I don't know how you got a better compliment than that.
No, I thought that was high praise, right?
We spoke a couple weeks ago, ladies and gentlemen, in an interview for the Limbaugh Letter, and I'm going to take a different tack in this one.
Folks, political memoirs, many people think of them as dry, dull, boring, and not too revealing.
This one is anything but.
And Mr. Vice President, I'm going to embarrass you here, and there's no way to avoid it, but you are a great man.
You have devoted your life to the service of the United States of America.
I have just a brief resume here.
1969, Congressional Inter William Steigert, 69 to 70, working for Donald Rumsfeld.
71, White House staff assistant.
71 to 73, director of the Cost of Living Council.
74-75, Assistant to the President under Gerald Ford.
75 to 77, White House Chief of Staff, President Ford.
1976, Campaign Manager for Ford's re-election.
79 to 89, five-term Congressman Wyoming.
87-89, Director, Council on Foreign Relations.
1989, House Minority Whip.
89 to 93, Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr.
93 to 95, Second Term Director, Council, Foreign Relations, 95 to 2000, Chairman of the Board, CEO Halliburton.
And of course, 2001 to 2009, Vice President of the United States.
You've given your country everything.
What, if anything, stands out in all of your years of service?
What stands out is if you could single anything out as the most important and the most crucial element you were involved in in all those years.
Boy, that's a good question, Rush.
I guess sort of, let me give you a two-part answer that comes at a couple of different ways.
Number one, sort of one of the absolute highlights of my career was the opportunity I had over time to work with the men and women of the United States military.
They were superb, and it was always an honor, whether Secretary of Defense or Vice President or Chief of Staff, anytime you could be associated with an enterprise peopled with the folks that serve in uniform for the United States of America was a very special period in your career.
I guess in terms of a specific result or something that I feel was most important that I was involved in would have been the years after 9-11 when we put together things like the terror surveillance program and enhanced interrogation techniques.
A lot of that stuff very controversial, but it was absolutely essential in allowing us to prevent further mass casualty attacks against the United States by al-Qaeda.
The fact that for seven and a half years there after 9-11, we were able to keep the country safe from attack.
Let's talk about that because you write extensively of the process that led you through the enhanced interrogation techniques.
You discuss Abu Zubaida, what led you to Ramzi bin al-Shib, eventually to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
And when you write about this, you mention that it was two United States senators in your own party who threw some obstacles in your way, despite the invaluable intelligence we were obtaining through the program of enhanced interrogation.
And by the way, you describe how it all was sanctioned as legal by the authorities.
In 2005, there was a move on Capitol Hill led by Senators McCain and Graham to end it.
Tell us about that.
Well, there were no question there were controversies surrounding that particular program.
John McCain, a man I've known well, served within the House and so forth.
John had strong feelings against the enhanced interrogation technique that went back, he said, to his own personal experience as a POW in Vietnam.
And we just disagreed.
There were others who served in the military in those days who were also POWs and who believed very deeply in what we were doing, who strongly supported our efforts.
So there were divisions over the question of what was appropriate here in terms of putting together the program.
But it had all been sanctioned illegal.
What was Senator McCain's problem with it?
And he wasn't alone.
Senator Graham was part of this.
This was 2005.
You even describe you and the then CIA Director Porter Goss went up to Capitol Hill to talk to them about this.
Right.
Yeah, we were, there was a vote, as a matter of fact, in Congress because it was controversial.
A lot of people, and I don't attribute this to Senators Graham or McCain.
I think they were operating out of conviction.
But there were, I can recall a vote in the Senate.
But you say he didn't even want to hear what you had to say.
Well, that's true.
We tried to, we set up a meeting in the secure spaces in the Capitol building where the Senate Intel Committee used to meet.
And I took Porter Goss, who was then the CIA director, and myself went up and sat down to brief Senator McCain on the program.
And John only stayed a couple of minutes and then got very angry and stormed out.
We were never able to talk to him about it.
But we also had a vote along about that time.
There was an effort to put an amendment on a bill that would have required that you could only use the U.S. Army Field Manual in terms of techniques that you applied to high-value detainees.
And that measure passed the Senate 90 to 9.
There were only nine votes who stood with us in the program.
Now, in private, they'd say, we're with you.
You need to keep doing it.
It's an important program.
But when it was a public issue, there were a lot of members who didn't want to have to defend it, who had it for the hills because of the controversial nature of the program.
But the fact was, as you mentioned, Rush, we didn't do anything that wasn't signed up to by the Justice Department.
In fact, the techniques we used were techniques that we used with our own people in training.
There wasn't anything there.
Well, I'm just going to mention that.
Everything you used is part of training for our own troops, including waterboarding, correct?
Correct.
And everybody thinks when they hear enhanced interrogation techniques, everybody thinks that waterboarding is what's being discussed.
In this case, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is there any doubt that it succeeded?
No, he was the, I think there were three prisoners that were subjected to waterboarding.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the one that it was most effective with.
And in fact, he became a major source.
I've seen studies to this effect.
Major source of information and intelligence for us about al-Qaeda.
On 9-11, there was a lot we did not know about Al-Qaeda.
It was still an organization that was relatively new to us.
We didn't have a lot of detail about the members and where they operated and so forth.
We needed to learn all of that if we were going to track down those people responsible for 9-11 and prevent further attacks.
And capturing Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in 03 and then being able to interrogate him effectively with these techniques was vital in giving us the knowledge we needed in order to defeat Al-Qaeda.
Talking with Vice President Dick Cheney, his book is in my time.
We have to take a brief commercial time out here.
But again, folks, the phrase has been bandied about, heads will explode.
And even though he denied it, General Powell's head has exploded.
It did on Sunday on Bob Schieffer.
He said something, by the way, Mr. Vice President, yesterday.
Before we go to the break, this may not be news, but it was to me.
General Powell said that when he found out with Richard Armitage that Armitage was the source for Bob Novak on the whole Valerie Plain story, that they called the Department of Justice.
Now, I didn't know that.
I thought all along that Armitage wasn't saying a word while Scooter Libby was being held accountable and twisting in the wind in a process trial or crime for this.
Were you aware that Armitage had gone to DOJ?
And if that happened, why did the special prosecutor even pursue the case if they knew who the leaker was?
We didn't find that out until much later.
In fact, he'd been the source, I think, back as early as June of that year of 03 for Bob Woodward.
Woodward didn't write about it, but Woodward actually taped the conversation, and it's available on the internet.
But that's a key question.
So you didn't, you did not know that Armitage and General Powell had called the Department of Justice and said, we are the source.
And Armitage, I'm the source for Robert Novak's piece.
You did not know that they had made that call.
That's correct.
And I don't know what they said when they talked to Justice.
I do know I think the supposition is that the Justice Department knew by the fall of 03 that Armitage was the source of the leak.
When they appointed the special prosecutor Fitzgerald, and he started work in December of 03, one of the first things he learned was that Armitage was the source of the leak.
But even knowing all of that, ordinarily, since that was the charge that was being investigated, that should have ended it.
Instead, what happened was they ran a two-year investigation that drug a lot of folks over at the White House through the mud and mire of a grand jury proceeding in order to try to find somebody they could indict.
And of course, in the final analysis, Armitage was never sanctioned for the leak that he was responsible for.
And the only one who was was Mr. Libby.
Who didn't do anything.
Correct.
Other than apparently get confused in testimony and get caught up in what they call a process crime.
Well, that's fascinating.
I thought that was news yesterday or Sunday when General Powell said that.
We must take the break now.
We'll be back with Vice President Cheney right after this.
And we're back with Vice President Dick Cheney.
In my time is the title of his memoir.
Mr. Vice President, I have a procedure.
I ask people before interviewing people such as yourself, is there anything you'd like to hear Vice President Cheney answer?
And it's amazing with you.
I've asked people from all walks of life, every sphere of circle friends I have.
And without question, the most frequently asked thing I was asked to ask you was, how did you deal, I mean, being the person that you are, investing your life for the goodness of this country, how did you deal the last eight years of your service, being called a demon, a devil, Dart, Vader, the most divisive people?
I want to understand what that's like from a personal standpoint and how you dealt with it and stayed focused on your job.
How did it affect you?
Well, if you've been around as long as I had Rush by the time I got to be vice president, I certainly expected, especially if I did anything controversial, that I was going to be the subject of a certain amount of criticism and abuse.
It goes with the turf.
You can't let it get to you.
If you haven't got a thick enough hide to take some of those slings and arrows and to keep on doing your job, then you're probably in the wrong job.
Part of it, frankly, some of the comedians at night was pretty good.
Pretty funny, that is.
I got as big a laugh out of it as anybody.
I remember Daryl Hammond on Saturday Night Live portraying me as a one-man Afghani wrecking crew living in a cave outside Kandahar, Afghanistan.
I had in my chest a built-in machine that made me invisible to radar and brewed coffee.
Again, another compliment.
Another compliment, that's right.
But you really had to take it with a grain of salt.
It wasn't always personal.
Sometimes it was.
But it goes with the turf.
Weapons of mass destruction.
In Iraq, what was your reaction?
I mean, every intelligence service around the world, including our own, said that there was little doubt Saddam Hussein was working on a serious weapons of mass destruction program, perhaps even nuclear.
After the invasion, for all intents and purposes, nothing was found.
What was your reaction?
Well, what I recall from the report that was done, you may remember we had an Iraq survey group that went in and looked at everything, and they're the ones that did not find any stockpiles.
Obviously, that had been falsely reported.
On the other hand, what they did find was that Saddam had retained the capability to go back into production on a relatively short notice.
He had the raw materials and the technology and the people to be able to resume his program as soon as sanctions were lifted and the inspectors disappeared from the scene.
Mr. Kay, who in fact headed up that search, said after he'd finished his work with the survey group that he was more concerned about the threat Saddam represented than he had been when he thought he actually had stockpiles.
In other words, very concerned that Saddam was potentially somebody who would quickly get back into the business of producing WMD.
And again, he's one of the few people who not only had produced it in the past, he'd also used it in the past.
So it was to say that there was no WMD, that's sort of the conventional wisdom that's out there.
But what there was, there were no stockpiles.
But there clearly was the capacity as well as supposedly the intention to go back into that business on short notice.
You're out of politics now.
You're an observer.
You finished the book.
You're doing your interview.
What is your assessment of the country?
What's your assessment of the future?
Well, I'm as pro-American as I've ever been.
I've got seven grandkids.
I hope that they'll take away from my own experience willingness on their part to get involved in our political system and be a part of the history that's bound to be made in the decades ahead.
I'm worried.
I think we've got some significant problems right now.
You talk about them a lot on your show, and legitimately so.
I think we've got to be very concerned still about the prospects of a terrorist attack on the United States with something deadlier than airline tickets and box cutters.
I think the debt problem we've got is horrendous and badly needs to be resolved.
But I'm also worried about such things as the fact that this year's campaign coming up, everybody's focusing on jobs in the economy, and it's very important to do.
But I'm worried that the price for that will be paid by drastic cuts in the defense budget.
And that would be a big mistake.
I think we've got to find ways to make certain we don't decimate our military capabilities as we try to bring our domestic spending under control.
We've got about a minute and a half here.
The current Republican presidential field.
Anything surprise you about it?
Well, I haven't signed on with anybody yet at this stage.
I expect in the final analysis, I will support the Republican candidate.
But I hope so.
I can't imagine I, well, I'm confident I won't support President Obama.
Obviously, I've got fundamental disagreements with him.
But I think we'll have to see what develops here over the course of the next few months, and hopefully we'll have a good strong candidate emerge from that primary process.
I know you're really busy today.
This is my second opportunity to talk to you.
Folks, I want to tell you, the newsletter interview takes an entirely different tack than this one.
It's a little bit more, well, I won't describe it.
Just read it when you get to the newsletter.
But I wanted to thank you, Mr. Vice President, for giving me both opportunities to talk to you and for giving me the chance to embarrass you here.
I do think you're a great man, and I think that this book of yours is no matter what page you open it to, it's riveting.
It is fascinating.
It is not your typical political memoir, ladies and gentlemen.
It is from the heart and honest, and there are heads exploding, despite the fact people may not want to admit that.
Want to congratulate you on such a great book, and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about it, sir.
Well, thank you, Rush.
You do great work, and I'm a huge fan, as you know, and I'm honored that you take time out of your show to chat about it.
Anytime.
Vice President Dick Cheney, and the title of the book is In My Time.
And we'll be back right after this.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have Rush Limbaugh here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Now, this story is from today.
I could swear that I had this story a week ago before I went on vacation.
I know I did.
It may have been about a different, I think it was.
It was about a different green outfit.
Now, listen to this.
This is from Fox News.
A green jobs program, one of America's greenest cities, is being called a bust 16 months after a $20 million federal grant to weatherize homes in Seattle ended up putting just 14 people to work in mostly administrative jobs and upgrading only three homes in the area.
Todd Myers, who wrote the book EcoFads, told Fox News that jobs just aren't there.
So we're training people for jobs that don't exist.
Now, what was before I left on vacation, there was a story like this?
Some green outfit shutting down.
I think it also had to do with the weatherization of homes.
And of course, this green energy jobs, this is one of Obama's big hooks for the future.
This is where our economy is going to revive.
And this is the kind of nonsense that evolves from discussions.
It was a solar power company that went kaput.
It was a Massachusetts solar power company went to put it moved to China.
That's what it was.
They moved over to Chikom's, now a green outfit in Seattle.
And this is happening.
Nobody's buying the vault.
The whole foundation of the new technology, all these new green jobs that Obama promised, is just imploding on itself.
It never existed in the first place.
Now, you ask yourself, hey, these are smart people.
I mean, they've got college degrees.
They have, as we used to say in Missouri, book learning.
But they're idiots.
They're just full-blown idiots.
And they sit around the faculty lounge and they theorize about all this stuff.
Green.
What do you mean?
No.
Well, of course, of course, they're all liberal idiots.
I mean, I don't think I need to mention that they're liberals.
Everybody knows that.
I'm sorry.
These people sit around in the faculty lounge and they theorize about all this utopian stuff.
None of them have ever been in the private sector.
None of them have ever changed the oil in their car.
They've never gotten their fingernails dirty, and they're sitting around talking about clean, renewable energy.
There's no such thing.
Even the sun's not renewable.
The sun's going to burn out someday.
The sun is going to run out of energy.
It's going to go dark.
And yet, Somebody who believes in this nonsense has been elected president of the United States and has made it a central portion of his jobs program to create all of these green energy jobs.
And there aren't any.
And in fact, there is a country that has really gone full bore into trying to do this.
And they practically bankrupted themselves.
The country is Spain.
And it happened recently within years.
Recently enough that anybody could learn this is not what you do.
And yet here we are continuing to plod forward on this same myth.
We're chasing rainbows.
I don't want to hear about all these good intentions.
Well, Rush, you got to at least give them credit for their good intentions.
They're trying.
I don't know.
That doesn't count.
All their good intentions.
What did that get us with the war on poverty?
What did that get us with a great society?
All these great, every liberal program had come down the pike.
Social Security.
I know this is going to irritate some of you.
It is a Ponzi scheme that is given credibility simply because it's run by the government.
But it's no different than what Bernard Madoff was doing.
There's not a shred's bit of difference in what Madoff is doing and what Social Security is.
Pure and simple.
And we have reached the point where Madoff went to jail in Social Security.
There's no longer money to pay late arriving investors.
The early investors get paid off as later suckers pour money into the program.
In our case, it was mandatory.
We had to invest.
We were given no choice.
But it's a failure.
It's an absolute disaster.
And look at how many programs in our entitlement structure are modeled after Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, you name it.
And behind every one of these programs was big hearts, good intentions, compassion.
We are going to help people.
And we're not.
How are people being helped now?
This is all, it's all caught up with us.
And now, green jobs.
Seattle Green Jobs Program.
They got, I forgot to tell you, there's a really key element of this story that in my eagerness here, I left out.
They got 20 million federal dollars, which is really what this is all about.
They got 20 million federal dollars to weatherize homes.
14 jobs were created with the $20 million, most of them administrative, and only three homes were upgraded.
Now, what do you think happened to the money?
From back in July of 2009, press release from Obama's union brown shirts, the SEIU.
Union leader says greening buildings is key to a green economy.
Speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures Summit on Green Jobs, 32 BJ SEIU President Mike Fishman called on lawmakers around the country to prioritize buildings in their green strategies because buildings account for 60% of the country's total energy consumption and generate 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions.
So man-made global warming, a hoax and a fraud, was the basis on which federal dollars were borrowed, printed, spent, taxed, whatever, and given to other people for phony jobs that were never going to be anything.
It's a money laundering scam.
The green jobs industry is a money laundering scam.
It's a vote buying scam.
It's nothing other than a slush fund, the stimulus plan slush fund.
Green jobs sound good, and look at how many countries get on board this green business in their marketing because they think that you, the general public, have fallen for it.
And so every company touts how they're greening their manufacturing process, greening their sales process, greening the very ingredients in their products or service or what have you, all to make you think they care about the environment and that they are good stewards.
And in fact, all it is is a giant slush fund.
One slush fund after another, federal taxpayer dollars going to Democrat candidates, supporters, donors, what have you, under the guise of creating a new industry, green jobs, weatherizing homes, protecting the environment, saving the climate.
It's a huge, huge scam.
Anything to do with energy and the environment that involves man-made global warming, climate change is now an official scam.
Three homes weatherized in Seattle.
You know what that means?
That means they just picked three homes to weatherize just to be able to say that the program did some work for which it was created.
14 people in administrative posts hired with a $20 million federal grant.
Would somebody explain to me how a $20 million federal grant to weatherize homes is an industry anyway, green or otherwise?
Tell me, how in the name of Sam Hill does that create jobs?
So the president gets to run around talk about all the job creation he's engaged in, all the new energy, all this sweet sounding stuff, and every bit of it is a scam, just like Social Security and Madoff was a scam.
And folks, it's important to understand this because all of this, all of this comes from the American left.
All of this is liberalism.
This is what liberalism is.
And this scam, green jobs, I'll tell you, the end result is nothing more than shifting money to unions.
In fact, I'd venture to say that over 75% Of every Obama jobs or similar type initiative has been a scam or a ruse to get money to unions because that money will come back in the form of dues, donations, contributions, what have you to the Democrat Party.
In the meantime, you, the innocent citizens of this country, are being lied to and scammed, taken to the bank, taken to the cleaners, while you lose your jobs and while your kids and grandkids' futures, maybe for the first time in the country's history, are not nearly as bright as your future was when you were their age.
And all of this done for one reason, for one express purpose, and that is the empowerment of Democrats in perpetuity by growing government and government union jobs.
How many Chevy vaults have been sold?
225, 125, whatever the number is.
Electric cars, not to harp on the vault, any electric car.
Where does the electric car get its power?
From a battery.
Where does the battery get its power?
You plug it into the wall.
Well, where is the power source for what's behind the wall?
It's the power plant.
Where does the power plant get its power?
Where does it get its energy?
Coal.
What does President Obama say he is hell-bent on putting out of business?
Coal.
So what is going to power your electric car?
In fact, if everybody went out and bought electric cars like Obama wants, we would have to be building a coal-fired power plant every two days just to provide the electricity to charge the batteries that'll let you drive 40 miles per charge.
We can't afford four more years of this.
All America will still be here.
People will still get up in the morning and go to work and all that.
Yankees and Red Sox will play baseball.
The NFL will still be going on.
All that will happen.
But the country will not be what it was.
And if this goes on another four years, it may be two generations minimum to reverse all of this or even get started reversing it.
We can't afford four more years of this.
This administration is nothing but a scam.
It's nothing but a fraud.
There's a great piece.
I've got to take a break here very quickly.
It's a great piece in The New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin.
You know what it's about?
It is the most amazing story.
A story I never thought I would see, although I know why it's been written.
It is a story about how Clarence Thomas is the driving intellectual force of the United States Supreme Court.
Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginny are the two people working the hardest to stop Obamacare.
It is Clarence Thomas that provides the guidance for Antonin Scalia, not the other way around, according to this story by Jeffrey Toobin.
I got to take a break.
I'll expand on it some moments from now.
Okay, we're back.
And those of you on hold on the phones, be patient.
I'm going to get to you in the next hour.
Walter Russell Mead has reviewed the Jeffrey Toobin piece in The New Yorker about Clarence Thomas.
And Walter Russell Mead's thesis.
And folks, I tell you, this is, you're going to be as stunned as I was when you hear this.
Walter Russell Mead's thesis of Toobin's article is that Clarence Thomas, while being completely smeared and underestimated by the left, may well have already laid much of the intellectual groundwork necessary to bring down the New Deal era scaffolding around the Constitution, may have already laid the groundwork for repealing Obamacare.
Here's a quote from the Toobin story.
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Clarence Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court.
When it comes to the free speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and potentially the powers of the federal government, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more.
Rarely has a Supreme Court justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
Now, I know you're asking, wait a minute, they impugn this guy.
He's an idiot.
He doesn't say anything in oral arguments.
He does nothing but copycat Scillia.
What is this?
I'll tell you what it is.
It's the truth.
And the reason that they are getting to the truth now is because what Toobin's doing with this piece, he's alerting the left to start targeting ethics complaints against Clarence Thomas to try to knock him out of the Obamacare decision.
They are going to try to force Clarence Thomas to recuse himself or to force himself out of the decision-making precisely because what they've written about Thomas is true.
He is an electoral giant.
He has laid the groundwork and he could lead the court to repealing Obamacare.
And that's why they're doing the story now, to try to alert the left to ratchet up their attacks on Justice Thomas anew.
Back after this.
Okay, brief timeout here coming up with the fastest three hours in media.
I'm going to spend a little time exploring the Jeffrey Toobin piece on Justice Thomas.
It's fascinating on a number of levels, and you need to know as many of them as I can convey to you.
So we'll do that, and we'll get to your phone calls too.