What Powell Also Said

Liberals were gloating Sunday when General Powell made news by seemingly going after Dick Cheney on the "we are less safe" thing. Here's the clip..


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Powell basically disagreed using boilerplate such as the CIA is still in place, TSA is still at the airport, military is surging in Afghan, etc, but failed to mention the lack of an interrogation program, which has been Cheney's main beef for a long time.

Matter of fact, Schieffer followed up by reminding Powell that even Democrats were critical of the Abdulmuttalob episode, to which he agreed, which seems to be an agreement with Cheney. Part of the mishandling was not having a functioning HIG interrogation group in place to take captured terrorists--because Obama canceled everything when he took office. So the headline could have been, "Powell Agrees with Cheney that Underwear Bomber was Mishandled". But it wasn't.

Something else-- he basically said Bush helped save the economy from a depression:

Let's remember at the time of the election the country was falling into a recession, our financial system was collapsing, we were in deep trouble, and as a result of some actions president Bush took with the TARP program before he left, and what president Obama has done, our financial situation has stabilized and our financial institutions are secure now, even though I'm not happy with everything they have done.

So the headline could have been, "Powell Disagrees with Obama on Who Saved Economy", but somehow it wasn't.

Actually, aside than the little bit of partisanship where he defended his Obama pick, his feeling that terrorists should get the same rights of a US citizen, and that Obama doesn't have socialist tendencies and that one man cannot change a government, quite a bit of what Powell said was sensible.