Karl Rove served with Dick Cheney, he knew Dick Cheney and on Tuesday, the Republican strategist said that President Barack Obama is no Dick Cheney.
Rove was responding to an interview this week in which Obama pushed back against comparisons to the former vice president amid revelations of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs.
“The president of the United States, President Obama, should not have drawn [Cheney] into the conversation,” Rove said during an appearance on Fox News. “If he’s really focused on Dick Cheney then he should have run for vice president with John Kerry in 2004 rather than running for the United States Senate. It was beneath the president to sort of reach out there and grab Dick Cheney and say, ‘I’m not Dick Cheney.'”
Rove said that Obama lacks Cheney’s courage.
“He’s right, he’s not Dick Cheney,” Rove said. “Dick Cheney at least had the guts to step up and defend these National Security Agency programs, where the president was sending out underlings in order to defend it himself and then going on a talk radio program, a TV talk program, as he fled the country for the G-8 meeting.”
In fact, Obama has repeatedly defended the NSA programs, including in the interview with Charlie Rose that Rove referenced.
