During the final segment of MSNBC’s coverage of Barack Obama’s brief Wednesday night speech — in which the Democratic occupant of the White House called for air strikes in Iraq and Syria to combat the ISIS terrorist group — Hardball host Chris Matthews used the occasion to hammer former Vice President Dick Cheney as the cause, not just of the current president’s problems in the Middle East, but of creating Islamic terrorism as a whole.
“Please do not listen to Dick Cheney,” Matthews advised Obama. “He’s the one that created al-Qaeda by taking over the holy land in Saudi Arabia. He’s the one that de-Baathicized [sic] the Iraqi government. He created ISIS, and he’s coming back again with more advice.”
Apparently, Matthews and other contributors on MSNBC have a limited grasp of geography since the U.S. placement of Air Force units was at the Prince Sultan Air Base in al-Kharj, more than eight hours away from the “holy land” of Mecca.
The other MSNBC hosts all agreed (in less explicit terms) that all this was a Bush-Cheney mess, in slightly less fervent tones. Rachel Maddow echoed “The consequences of the war in Iraq was the creation of the group that is now called ISIS. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before we invaded Iraq in 2003; that is the group that eventually became this group that we are now fighting.”