On Sunday, former Vice President Cheney said that President Obama has already made America more unsafe. When Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked for his reaction to Cheney’s criticisms, Gibbs dryly said that CNN invited the former VP because “Rush Limbaugh was busy,” labeling him “the next most popular member of the Republican cabal.”

Apparently, Gibbs’s remarks were beyond the pale for Karl Rove. Yesterday, on the O’Reilly Factor, Rove denigrated Gibbs, comparing him to “some wise-cracking junior high smart mouth.” “These are real issues,” Rove urged, complaining about Gibbs’s “tone”:

ROVE: What surprised me was frankly the tone of Mr. Gibbs, who sounded like some wise-cracking junior high smart mouth. And it would have been better both for Obama and for the country if Mr. Gibbs had, if he felt it necessary to respond, responded on the merits of the issue rather than, you know, putting such a heavy emphasis on his little sarcastic flip comment. Because these are real issues. These are real issues.

Watch it:

Rove’s holier-than-thou attitude is particularly hypocritical. It is Rove who has launched characteristically sleazy ad hominem attacks on his opponents. It is Rove who is planning to “name names” and single out Bush critics in his new book. And it is Rove who makes “sarcastic flip comments” about his rivals that make him sound like a “junior high smart mouth”:

– Echoing a right-wing smear, Rove called Obama “almost Marxian.”

– Referred to then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) as a “big blowhard doofus.”

– Slandered critics of President Bush as “elite, effete snobs.”

Of course, when Rove called his political opponents “Marxian,” “doofus,” and “snobs,” he was talking about the “real issues.”

Weeks after President Obama was inaugurated, Dick Cheney gave an interview to Politico slamming Obama’s detainee policies and warning that he was making America less safe (charges he repeated again last Sunday). Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff who left the Bush administration in protest, wrote an essay on the Washington Note last evening slamming Cheney’s fearmongering. Wilkerson calls Cheney “evil” and says his detainee policies were only “assisting” terrorists:

Cheney went on to say in his McLean interview that “Protecting the country’s security is a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people and we are not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.” I have to agree but the other way around. Cheney and his like are the evil people and we certainly are not going to prevail in the struggle with radical religion if we listen to people as he. [...]

But al-Qa’ida will be back. Iraq, GITMO, Abu Ghraib, heavily-biased U.S. support for Israel, and a host of other strategic errors have insured al-Qa’ida’s resilience, staying power and motivation. How we deal with the future attacks of this organization and its cohorts could well seal our fate, for good or bad. Osama bin Laden and his brain trust, Aman al-Zawahiri, are counting on us to produce the bad. With people such as Cheney assisting them, they are far more likely to succeed.

Wilkerson also writes that Powell and Richard Armitage “labored to ameliorate the GITMO situation from almost day one” but that Rumsfeld and Cheney were “[s]tanding resolutely” in the way and would “have none of it.”

This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) discussed the creation of a new group of “moderate” Democratic senators whose goal is to “restrain the influence of party liberals.” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell explained the implications of Bayh’s new group, saying “this is the group that will control the outcome politically on what can pass on the Senate floor.”

Bayh explained that his office would be issuing a press release detailing the group and its 15 inaugural members. This press release is now available and explains that the group is “will meet every other Tuesday before the Democratic Caucus lunch to discuss legislative strategies and ideas”:

[T]he Moderate Dems are joined by a shared commitment to pursue pragmatic, fiscally sustainable policies across a range of issues, such as deficit containment, health care reform, the housing crisis, educational reform, energy policy and climate change.

In addition to Bayh, Sens. Tom Carper (D-DE) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) will lead the group. Other members include: Sens. Mark Udall (D-CO), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Mark Begich (D-AK), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Mark Warner (D-VA).

But Bayh also told MSNBC this morning that there are “three or four” members in what he called the “Witness Protection Program.” These members, Bayh explained, are currently attending the group’s meetings but do not wish to be “publicly identified.” Based on press reports, however, ThinkProgress has compiled a list of who might be the three anonymous “moderates.” The following members have been reported as attending Bayh’s meetings in recent weeks, but are not named in today’s press release:

– Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-PA)
– Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
– Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR)

Additionally, Bayh told MSNBC this morning that yesterday’s meeting featured a presentation by Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) on the upcoming budget debate.

Steve Benen observes, “The president — you know, the one who just easily won a national election and enjoys strong approval ratings — will face governing challenges in a Senate in which his own party has 58 (eventually, 59) members. Part of the problem is Republican obstructionism, and part of it is Bayh and the Blue Dogs who feel more comfortable driving with their foot on the brake.”

Some members of the Obama administration have suggested that they might use the budget reconciliation process to pass their health care and energy proposals, which would require only 51 votes in the Senate, instead of the usual 60. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) doesn’t like this idea, claiming that it is the equivalent of “running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River.” But The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn notes that Gregg wasn’t so opposed to pushing changes through budget reconciliation in 2005 when Republicans were in power:

Republican leaders indicated Tuesday that they plan to press the issue of drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as part of a so-called budget reconciliation process, which cannot be subject to a Democratic filibuster–a tactic that has blocked the refuge’s development in the past. …

Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H. said it was reasonable to assume ANWR, as the refuge is commonly called, would be part of the budget measure.

“The president asked for it, and we’re trying to do what the president asked for,” Gregg said Tuesday after meeting privately with Republicans on his panel.

Matt Yglesias writes that “Gregg is being a hypocrite and deserves to be called on it; media outlets who quote him complaining without noting that he’s a hypocrite are being irresponsible.”