Cheney’s Excuse For Economic Crisis: ‘Stuff Happens’

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Cheney has a ready excuse for the economic debacle: ‘Stuff happens’

Crooks and Liars- By David Neiwert Sunday Mar 15, 2009 5:00pm

Interviewed by John King on CNN’s State of the Union this weekend, former vice president Henry F. Potter Dick Cheney wasn’t really able to tell us why Republicans like himself should have any credibility whatsoever when it comes criticizing the Obama economic plan, considering how well theirs worked out.

Here’s how theirs worked out:

Here’s how Cheney explained it:

Well, there are all kinds of arguments to be made on that point. But there’s something that is more important than the specific numbers you’re talking about, and that had to be priority for our administration.

Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11. We had 3,000 Americans killed one morning by al Qaeda terrorists here in the United States. We immediately had to go into the wartime mode. We ended up with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of that is still very active. We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina, for example. All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren’t originally part of the budget.

Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did.

… We always said — I always said that wartime scenario is cause for an exception in terms of spending. It was appropriate in World War II, certainly, and I think it’s appropriate now.

So his excuse for the sour economy was 9/11 — which happened six years before the economy started heading south — and the Iraq invasion — which turned out not to have been quite as necessary as advertised.

MORE HERE

Dick Cheney – CNN State of Union – John King part 1

Dick Cheney – CNN State of Union – John King part 2