In an interview with Sean Hannity that aired last night on Fox News, former vice president Dick Cheney praised a new book attacking President Obama called The Amateur by discredited right-wing author Ed Klein, a conspiracy theorist who has promoted claims that Obama is Muslim, wasn’t born in the U.S. and that Bill Clinton raped his wife Hillary. But Cheney appears to believe that all this makes for a good scholar:

HANNITY: You’ve had time to now really study Barack Obama for four years. What do you think you know about him now or believe about him now that you didn’t believe four years ago in terms of his ideology, philosophy, governing philosophy? [...]

CHENEY: One of the things that’s been most enlightening for me is to read this new book that’s out that is — deals with this whole question of competence, and written by Ed Klein, used to be with the “New York Times.” It’s called “The Amateur.”

And it goes into great detail in a whole number of different areas in terms of his philosophy, and why he believes what he did, and how he got there, and how he’s managed or failed to manage in the White House.

Media Matters has the clip:

As Media Matters has noted, The Amateur is filled with falsehoods, distortions “lazy research, bad writing, bizarre generalizations…and gossip forwarded by anonymous sources.” New York Times literary critic Janet Maslin said the book “adds little to the record about Mr. Obama’s past” and that Klein “has no capacity for explaining specifics” of his criticisms of Obama. The intro to her review reads:

“The Amateur” by Edward Klein is a book about an inept, arrogant ideologue who maintains an absurdly high opinion of his own talents even as he blatantly fails to achieve his goals. Oh, and President Obama is in this book too.

And as recently as last May, Klein was still promoting the conspiracy theory that Obama is a Muslim. But aside from his new thinly-sourced book, Klein has a history of advancing false allegations about Obama as fact, so much so that conservative writers like Peggy Noonan, Kathleen Parker and even John Podhoretz won’t take him seriously.

Former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman (R) said Mitt Romney must do a better job of standing up to the radical elements of the Republican party and criticized her party’s nominee for not speaking out when an audience jeered a gay soldier during a September debate.

“Sister Souljah moment, you’re looking for,” Whitman explained Tuesday morning on CNN’s Starting Point. “President [Clinton] had that with Sister Souljah. Mitt Romney needs that.” Watch it:

Indeed, Romney has repeatedly refused to criticize the right-wing, ducking opportunities to condemn Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) Islamophobic witch hunt against a Hillary Clinton aide and refusing to directly repudiate Donald Trump’s claims that President Obama was born in Kenya. He also wouldn’t decry Rush Limbaugh for calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” or speak out against social conservatives who opposed his decision to hire an openly-gay national security spokesperson.