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The man who was vice president during the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001 says that last year's attack in Benghazi was "one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career."

In an interview on Fox News on Monday, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama and his administration of lying about the attack in Benghazi and then staging a cover up to hide the lies.

"They lied," Cheney said. "They claimed it was because of a demonstration video so that they wouldn’t have to admit it was really all about their incompetence."

"I think it’s one of the worst incidents, frankly, that I can recall in my career," he insisted. "If they told the truth about Benghazi, that it was a terrorist attack by an Al-Qaeda-led group, it would destroy the confidence that was the basis of his campaign for reelection."

"They were trying to perpetuate this fiction that there was no terrorist threat because they got bin Laden and that's a lie."

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Joe Scarborough is back at it again, apologizing for torture and telling lies about whether it works. Every time I think this show can't get much worse, I turn it on like I did this morning and realize I'm wrong. This had to be one of the more disgusting segments I've watched in a while, and that's saying a lot for this show. Scarborough and his panel members, David Ignatius and Jon Meacham, did their best to help revise history and help Scarborough play torture apologist while discussing the new film coming out this month, Zero Dark Thirty.

Glenn Greenwald has more on the problems with the premise of this movie: Zero Dark Thirty: new torture-glorifying film wins raves:

Earlier this year, the film "Zero Dark Thirty", which purports to dramatize the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, generated substantial political controversy. It was discovered that CIA and White House officials had met with its filmmakers and passed non-public information to them - at exactly the same time that DOJ officials were in federal court resisting transparency requests from media outlets and activist groups on the ground that it was all classified.

With its release imminent, the film is now garnering a pile of top awards and virtually uniform rave reviews. What makes this so remarkable is that, by most accounts, the film glorifies torture by claiming - falsely - that waterboarding and other forms of coercive interrogation tactics were crucial, even indispensable in finding bin Laden.In the New York Times on Sunday, Frank Bruni wrote: "I'm betting that Dick Cheney will love the new movie 'Zero Dark Thirty.'" That's because "'enhanced interrogation techniques' like waterboarding are presented as crucial" to finding America's most hated terrorist. [...]

The claim that waterboarding and other torture techniques were necessary in finding bin Laden was first made earlier this year by Jose Rodriguez, the CIA agent who illegally destroyed the agency's torture tapes, got protected from prosecution by the DOJ, and then profited off this behavior by writing a book. He made the same claim as "Zero Dark Thirty" regarding the role played by torture in finding bin Laden.

That caused two Senators who are steadfast loyalists of the CIA - Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin - to issue statements definitively debunking this assertion. Even the CIA's then-Director, Leon Panetta, made clear that those techniques played no role in finding bin Laden. An FBI agent central to the bin Laden hunt said the same.

What this film does, then, is uncritically presents as fact the highly self-serving, and factually false, claims by the CIA that its torture techniques were crucial in finding bin Laden. Put another way, it propagandizes the public to favorably view clear war crimes by the US government, based on pure falsehoods.

And Mediaite's Tommy Christopher did a nice job of breaking down just how dishonest this Morning Joe segment was: Joe Scarborough Claims Zero Dark Thirty Torture Scene True, Screenwriter And Facts Disagree:

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If it's Sunday, it's meet John McCain. McCain appeared on Face the Nation for I think about his gazillionth Sunday show appearance to throw some more stones at the Obama administration and beat some more war drums, because lord knows this man is not happy unless we're getting involved in another military engagement.

I hate to break it to McCain, but America's standing in the world improved the minute that President Obama was elected and the rest of the world was breathing a sigh of relief that George W. Bush was gone. There are plenty of us out here who don't like the fact that he's been too hawkish and continued too many of Bush's policies and hasn't held the Bush administration accountable for their actions. But to claim that because he hasn't been more aggressive that the President has somehow harmed our standing in the world is just utterly ridiculous.

McCain: U.S. "is weakened" under Obama:

Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., was skeptical that violent attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya were not preplanned.

"Most people don't bring rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons to demonstrations. That was an act of terror," McCain said on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "For anyone to disagree with that fundamental fact I think is really ignoring the facts." [...]

McCain said the United States has adopted a policy of "disengagement" under President Obama, which, he said, has "weakened" America's standing in the world.

Pointing to the violent protests this week in Benghazi, Libya and Cairo, Egypt, McCain said, "The fact is the United States is weakened.

"It was Osama bin Laden that said, 'When people see the strong horse and the weak horse, people like the strong horse.' Right now the United States is the weak horse." [...]

He also defended Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's rapid criticism of a statement put out by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo - before the protests turned violent - condemning the anti-Islam film.

"It was a semi-apology," McCain said of the Embassy's statement. "We shouldn't be apologizing for freedom of speech. We should be saying we demand freedom of speech for these people," he said.

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From this Tuesday's Morning Joe, former Gov. George Pataki really was not happy with author Kurt Eichenwald's new book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, or his op-ed which Susie wrote about here -- 9/11: When The Facts Didn't Fit Their Neocon Fantasy.

Unfortunately for him, Pataki managed to make a fool of himself while going after the author and throwing a bit of a fit on the show, because he freely admitted he hadn't read the book and didn't intend to. Nothing like conservatives sticking their fingers in their ears and going lalalala I can't hear you when someone's trying to tell them something they don't like. Eichenwald did a good job of pushing back at Pataki's assertions that the book was just intended as a hit piece on the Bush administration, actually read a few passages from the book and told Pataki that the most positive feedback he's gotten on the book is from members of the Bush administration.

I'm not sure where Scarborough slithered off to while this segment was airing, but he was no where to be found. I guess he wasn't so worried about one of his guests being attacked by another one, like we saw when he had so much concern for Reince Priebus when Chris Matthews jumped on him for the birtherism and racist dog whistles.

Partial transcript below the fold via:

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After Judith Miller went on Fox News Watch over the weekend to join the other guests there in carping about how dangerous the Obama administrations supposed national security leaks are which they've been accused of after the death of Osama bin Laden, Jon Stewart gave her the treatment she deserves on The Daily Show this Monday evening.

Sadly as everyone here knows all too well, after her stenography at The New York Times for Scooter Libby and his boss, former Vice President Darth Cheney to help lie us into invading Iraq, Miller is the last person that should be coming on the television complaining about an administration leaking.

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As TPM reported this Thursday evening, CBS News’ Jan Crawford sat down with Mitt Romney for an interview that is scheduled to air in full this Friday and Romney gave President Obama an "F' on foreign policy.

Despite Bin Laden, Romney Gives Obama An ‘F’ On Foreign Policy:

In an interview with CBS News’ Jan Crawford scheduled to air later tonight, Mitt Romney gives President Obama an ‘F’ grade on foreign policy, even when considering the successful raid on and death of Osama bin Laden.

“Oh an ‘F’, there’s no question about that,” Romney tells Crawford.

“Even despite the killing of Osama bin Laden?” asks Crawford.

“When I look at foreign policy, when I look at across the board in foreign policy, I look at the fact that he was looking to have a force of American troops staying in Iraq securing what was so hard to have been won there with a status of forces agreement - he failed to achieve it,” Romney explained. “I look at what’s happening in the Middle East - the Arab Spring has become the Arab Winter - that’s hardly a success.”

As we've already noted here Romney's idea of what makes for deciding on what is good foreign policy is to bring back in all of the Bush neocons to show us once again just how successful taking these same people's advice was under President Obama's predecessor and to constantly beat the drum for more military intervention as a first resort across the globe and for more military spending, and the cuts to domestic spending and our social safety nets as a result be damned.

It's astounding to me that those in the media refuse to acknowledge the recent history of just how disastrous Bush's policies were and why they're not asking Romney why he thinks taking advice from the same people who advocated for invading Iraq and Afghanistan is a good idea or who he should be hiring.

If Mitt Romney thinks President Obama deserves an "F" on foreign policy, I wonder what grade he thinks we ought to be giving him?

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As our friends at Raw Story noted this weekend, if President Obama is supposedly some "radical socialist" pushing an extreme "left wing agenda" as he's been painted by the the talking heads on the right, he's going a pretty lousy job at it, which was the subject of Bill Maher's New Rules segment this Friday evening.

Bill Maher: Obama ‘is a lousy socialist’:

Despite conservatives’ best efforts to paint Barack Obama as a “radical socialist,” Real Time host Bill Maher isn’t buying it.

Maher ended Friday night’s “New Rules” segment by calling out the Right’s ridiculous mischaracterization of the President.

“…Newt Gingrich called Obama the most radical Leftist President in history. Senator Marco Rubio called him the most divisive figure in American history. Michele Bachmann said Obama is the most radical President we have ever seen in the history of the country …John Bolton said Obama just doesn’t care about national security. Honestly, there are Mexican drug mules who don’t pull this much stuff out of their ass,” Maher said.

And as Mediaite noted, the rant started out as an attack on Ted Nugent and his recent tirades going after President Obama: Bill Maher: What Exactly Has Obama Done That Has Made Conservatives So Angry?:

Bill Maher finally got around to Ted Nugent in his final New Rule of the night, but used the rocker’s recent tirade against President Obama to ask the larger question about conservative outrage over the president. He argued that the country has really not changed that much from the George W. Bush era and, in fact, Obama has been making concessions that have not exactly pleased liberals. So what, Maher asked, are conservatives so angry about?

Here's more from Maher's rant in the segment above.

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On this Tuesday's The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart took some time to delve into the right wing's cognitive dissonance and their inability to give President Obama credit for anything, whether it be the killing of Osama bin Laden or Mitt Romney's recent ridiculous statement that he'll "take a lot of credit" for the auto industry coming back in America.

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While discussing whether the "war on terror" is over or not and some of the documents that were newly released that were acquired in the raid on Osama bin Laden's complex, The National Review's Rich Lowry decided to take a cheap shot at Media Matters. Apparently if a spokesman for a terrorist organization says something bad about Fox, that means the watchdog site Media Matters that also does not like Fox are exactly the same.

Here's the offending quote by the al Qaeda spokesman:

Adam Gadahn: In general, and not matter what material we send, I suggest that we should distribute it to more than one channel, so that there will be a healthy competition between the channels in broadcasting the material, so that no other channel takes the lead. It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News, let her die in anger.

Fox News Watch, which this segment is from, is supposed to be Fox's sorry excuse for a media watchdog site, that calls out biases in the "mainstream" evil liberal media, as opposed to all that "fair and balanced" reporting we get from Fox.

The show's equivalent we have from CNN is Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources. It's usually a toss up from week to week on which one is worse with failing completely to be any sort of check on whether we're getting any honest reporting from our corporate media, and instead of adding to making their so-called "reporting" worse.

The right absolutely hates Media Matters because they dare to record and often just post without comment, what comes out of their mouths on a daily basis. But that's the equivalent of siding with terrorists in Rich Lowry's world. I'm sure if anyone actually asks him about this later, he'll write it off as another sorry attempt at right wing humor and claim that he was just joking, because everyone knows that it's completely hilarious when you call people you disagree with terrorist sympathizers.

And h/t to Media Matters for flagging this clip.

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Rachel Maddow went after Mitt Romney for his photo op with Rudy Giuliani the other day where he gladly used New York firefighters for props. As Maddow pointed out in the segment above and Laura Clawson over at Daily KOS wrote about earlier this week, Romney has been railing on about those "overpaid" government workers in speech after speech, but then he cynically turns around and pretends like he's concerned about some of them having to work two jobs to get by.

Mitt Romney, who thinks government workers are unfairly overpaid, meets firemen who work two jobs:

Boy, if you listen to him some of the time, Mitt Romney just wants everyone to live really well. At a northern Virginia fundraiser, showing that he feels for the middle class, Romney cited a firefighter struggling to make ends meet:

"I spoke with a fireman yesterday, and he has a one-bedroom apartment, and his wife is pregnant, and he can't afford a second bedroom," he said, referring to a visit to New York City. "I asked the firefighters I was meeting with, about 15 or them, how many had had to take another job to make ends meet, and almost every one of them had."

You'd think, to read that, that Romney was suggesting he thinks that's a less than ideal situation, firefighters having to work two jobs or unable to afford a two-bedroom apartment. But while that may have been his implication in that moment, Jonathan Chait flags a quote from Romney's stump speech that reflects his policy positions on how many bedrooms firemen should be able to afford: that "we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve." The unfairness he's talking about, of course, isn't the unfairness of a quarter of workers earning less than two-thirds of the median income, or low-wage workers becoming an older and more educated group.

Rachel also shared a few charts from The New York Times in the opening of her segment, debunking that whole "Republicans are the party of small government" myth which you can read about here: Off the Charts: Shrinking Government and here: Government Getting Smaller in the U.S..