Obama to Newsweek: The Jury Was In On Cheney’s Failures Even Before Inauguration

Go check out the excerpts from Jon Meacham’s interview with the president aboard Air Force One.  Obama seems to be more befuddled by former Veep Dick Cheney than concerned:

Meacham: What’s your reaction to Vice President Cheney’s ongoing criticism? He’s not quite twittering your administration but he’s coming fairly close.

The President: You know, Dick Cheney had a strong perspective about national security. It was tested in the early years of the Bush administration, and I think it resulted in a series of very bad decisions. I think what’s interesting is that, in some ways, Dick Cheney actually lost these arguments inside the Bush administration.

And so he may have won early with Colin Powell and Condi Rice, but over the last two or three years of the Bush administration, I think there was a recognition among Republicans and Bush administration officials that these enhanced interrogation techniques that were being applied—that they had applied early on—were potentially counterproductive; that a posture of never talking to our enemies, of unilateral action, of framing national security only in terms of the application of force, often unilateral—that that wasn’t producing.

And so it’s interesting to me to see the vice president spending so much time trying to vindicate himself and relitigate the last eight years when, as I said, I think, actually, a lot of these arguments were settled even before we took over the White House.