Vice President Cheney and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) exchanged words today in back-to-back news conferences. Cheney accused Reid of “defeatism” and called Reid’s speech yesterday “uninformed and misleading.”

Reid assailed President Bush for again sending out his “attack dog, also known as Dick Cheney.”

Watch it:

Below, a rebuttal of Cheney’s main attacks:

CHENEY: “Yesterday, Senator Reid said the troop surge was against the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. That is plainly false. The Iraq Study Group report was explicitly favorable toward a troop surge to secure Baghdad.”

FACT: Iraq Study Group says escalation will “not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq.” The Iraq Study Group said that a “short-term redeployment” of troops into Baghdad could be part of a larger military, economic, and diplomatic plan to wind down the war. But the Bush escalation policy is not short-term. The ISG also states, “Sustained increases in U.S. troop levels would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in Iraq… As another American general told us, if the Iraqi government does not make political progress, ‘all the troops in the world will not provide security.’”

CHENEY: “Senator Reid said there should be a regional conference on Iraq. Apparently he doesn’t know that there is going to be one next week.”

FACT: Regional conferences mean little without diplomacy. Reid criticized Bush yesterday for failing to “launch any meaningful diplomatic efforts.” The fact that there is a regional conference means little if the U.S. chooses not to engage Iraq’s neighbors. An account from last month’s regional conference: “So they went, shook hands and chatted briefly. And that was the sum of the direct interaction between American and Iranian delegates at a long-awaited, day-long regional summit on Iraq today in Baghdad. … U.S. and Iranian officials said there were no private conversations of any substance.”

CHENEY: “Senator Reid said he doesn’t have real substantive meetings with the president. Yet immediately following last week’s meeting at the White House, he said, ‘It was a good exchange. Everyone voiced their considered opinion about the war in Iraq.’”

FACT: These two statements don’t contradict. In both, Reid simply says that Bush gave his opinion on Iraq. One is more diplomatic than the other, but they don’t contradict.

CHENEY: “What’s most troubling about Senator Reid’s comments yesterday is his defeatism. Indeed, last week he said the war is already lost. And the timetable legislation that he is now pursuing would guarantee defeat.”

FACT: Americans think Cheney is wrong. From a 4/19 Fox News poll: “[D]o you think it is accurate to compare withdrawal with surrender?” Yes: 33 percent | No: 61 percent

CNN’s Dana Bash reported that Cheney’s Capitol Hill press conference was “virtually unprecedented,” but that war critics “aren’t worried about it.” As one said in an email, “I wish Dick Cheney would come out every single day.”

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Last night, congressional Democrats settled on an agreement “to ignore President Bush’s veto threat and send him a $124 billion war spending bill that orders the administration to begin pulling troops out of Iraq,” with a final withdrawal goal of October 1, 2007.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) attacked the plan this morning on CNN, claiming it was “the first time I know of — in the middle of a war — that a country just announces that on a specific date it’s walking off the battlefield.” He added, “[I]t’s almost as if Americans want to say that we’re failing before our troops have a chance to get the job done.” Watch it:

Kyl doesn’t mention that on two separate occasions during the Clinton administration, he voted explicitly in favor of setting “a specific date” for American troops to “walk off the battlefield”:

– In June 1998, Kyl voted in favor of amending the National Defense Authorization Act for FY1999 to “require the President to submit Congress a plan for withdrawing United States forces from Bosnia and Herzegovina if the Congress does not so act by March 31, 1999.”

– In May 2000, Kyl voted against removing a provision from Military Construction Appropriations Act of 2001 that struck provisions requiring that President Bill Clinton withdraw all U.S. ground forces from Kosovo by July 1, 2001.

Since then, Kyl has become a critic of timelines and has voted again and again to give Bush a blank check in Iraq.

– Ryan Powers

Transcript: Read more

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) led a bipartisan delegation to Syria earlier this month, several Republican lawmakers criticized her for undermining the President:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH): “She’s going for one reason and that is to embarrass the president.”

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA): “The Speaker and many of her Democratic allies have become so drunk with grandiose visions of deposing Bush that they break bread with terrorists and enemies of the United States.”

Republican Rep. David Hobson (OH) was also on that trip. But in an interview published in the Washington Post today, he states that he never received any of the attacks that were thrown at Pelosi:

“Before we left, we met with the State Department people and nobody told us not to go,” Hobson said, adding that none of his Republican colleagues broached the subject, either. “Nobody ever called me to say, ‘Why are you going to Syria with those people?’“

Despite his attacks on Pelosi, Boehner has repeatedly refused to criticize Hobson for going to Syria. His spokesman recently confirmed that “there’s no tension or hard feelings there whatsoever” between Boehner and Hobson over the trip. Similarly, the lawmakers who criticized Pelosi were silent on similar congressional trips led by fellow Republicans.

Hobson has also defended Pelosi against his colleagues’ attacks, noting that she “did not engage in any bashing of Bush in any meeting I was in and she did not in any meeting I was in bash the policies as it relates to Syria.” He recently sent a box of chocolates to Pelosi to thank her for including him in the trip and said, “If asked, I would go again. I thought it was a good trip.”