Former Secretary of State Colin Powell slammed former Vice President Dick Cheney today on CBS’s Face the Nation, accusing Cheney of taking “cheap shots” at Bush administration officials in his new memoir and promoting it by using language inappropriate for a former vice president. While they worked for the same president, Cheney allegedly criticizes Powell in his much-anticipated autobiography, In My Time, which he predicted will have “heads exploding all over Washington.” That’s “the kind of headline you might see [on] one of the supermarket tabloids,” Powell said of Cheney’s exploding heads comment, “It’s not the kind of headline I would have expected to come from a former Vice President of the United States of America”:

SCHIEFFER: And we’re back now with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, we want to talk a little politics and talk a little about this book that Dick Cheney himself said is going to cause heads all over Washington to explode. I guess I’d ask you, General, is your head exploding?

POWELL: My head isn’t exploding, I haven’t noticed any other heads exploding in Washington, D.C. And the explosive part of the book is when Mr. Cheney says is explosive, but from what I’ve read in the newspapers and seen on television it’s essentially a rehash of events of seven or eight years ago. What really sort of got my attention was this way in which he characterized it: it’s going to cause heads to explode. That’s quite a visual. And in fact, it’s the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist, or the kind of headline you might see one of the supermarket tabloids write. It’s not the kind of headline I would have expected to come from a former Vice President of the United States of America. Mr. Cheney has had a long and distinguished career and I hope in his book that’s what he will focus on, not these cheap shots that he’s taking at me and other members of the Administration who served to the best of our ability for President Bush.

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In a withering criticism of the former vice president, Powell goes on at length and in detail to explain how the “cheap shots” Cheney aims at Powell and “other administration officials” are false, and how Cheney is himself to blame for much of it. “I’m the one who said to President Bush, [about Iraq] that if you break it, you own it,” Powell said, but “Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did not prepare for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.” On the Valerie Plame scandal, Powell says “White House operatives,” especially those “on Mr. Cheney’s staff,” did not fully cooperate in the FBI’s investigation and were not “forthcoming.” Powell also addresses his 2004 resignation, his speech the United Nations about the Iraq war, and other accusations Cheney makes about Powell in the book.

Powell said Cheney also unfairly attacks former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former CIA chief George Tenet, and even President Bush himself. “It’s not necessary to take these kind of barbs and then try to pump a book up by saying ‘heads will be exploding,’” Powell says, noting Cheney’s comments go beyond mere disagreements are personal in nature.

Powell and Cheney have publicly feuded before. Powell’s former chief of staff even once called Cheney “evil,” and Cheney said he sided with Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell after the latter criticized the radio hosts’ divisive rehtoric.

ThinkProgress has been documenting that cutting the Defense Department’s bloated budget has been gaining momentum over the past year as part of the solution to reduce the deficit and debt. Tea Party-backed Republicans, other conservatives, and progressives are coming together in calling for defense cuts. Ultra-conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) even said recently that “taking defense spending off the table is indefensible.” Today on CNN’s State of the Union, ret. General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell joined the growing chorus in calling for a reduction in defense spending:

CANDY CROWLEY: Where would you with specificity say, “Look we don’t need a bigger military?” Can we cut there?

POWELL: Yeah. I think we have to look at everything, domestic and our international accounts. As we draw down from Iraq and as over the next several years we draw down from Afghanistan, I see no reason why the military shouldn’t be looked at.

When the Cold War ended twenty years ago when I was chairman and Mr. Cheney was Secretary of Defense, we cut the defense budget by 25 percent and we reduced the force by 500,000 active duty soldiers. So it can be done. Now how fast you can do it and what you have to cut out remains to be seen. But I don’t think the defense budget can be made sacrosanct and it can’t be touched.

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Also on NBC’s Meet the Press today, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) said “no one can defend the expenditure of every dollar and cent at the Pentagon and we’ve got to be very serious that they’re doing more with less as well.”

Retired General and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell criticized the Tea Party movement’s inflammatory attacks against President Obama this morning during an appearance on NBC’s Meet The Press, singling out the rhetoric of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Powell said that while “there’s nothing wrong” with people like Sarah Palin “going out there, presenting her views and animating American political life,” “one of the problems that I’m having with all of this right now is that there is a certain undercurrent of thought that is not helpful.” “When people want to attack the President, attack him. Presidents are used to being attacked. But let’s not go down low,” Powell said.

Pressed by host David Gregory to respond to Newt Gingrich’s recent suggestion that Obama was displaying anti-colonial Kenyan behavior, Powell warned Americans to “think carefully” about Gingrich’s accusations and went on to debunk some of the right-wing’s conspiracy theories:

POWELL: I would just tell my fellow Americans, think carefully about what was just said. Think carefully about some of the stuff that is coming across the blogs and airwaves. Let’s make a couple of points. One, the President was born in the United States of America. Let’s get rid of that one, let’s get rid of the birther thing. Let’s attack him on policy, not nonsense. Next, he is a Christian, he is not a Muslim…And I think we have to be careful when we take things like Dinesh D’Souza’s book, which is the source of all of this, and suggest that somehow the President of the United States is channeling his dead father through some Kenyan spirits. This doesn’t make any sense. Mr. Gingrich does these things from time to time with a big, bold statement. He did it with Sotomayor, she is a “reverse racist.” He did it with Elena Kagan, she ought to be taken off the nomination for Supreme Court justice. And he does it occasionally to make news and also to stir up dust.

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Powell said that this kind of rhetoric “may appeal to the fringe elements of the party,” but won’t appeal “to all Republicans” or “the whole country.” He also suggested “it might be good for the President to have the Republicans owning one of the two bodies of our Congress, because then they have responsibility.” “You can’t just say ‘no’ to everything. You can’t just sit around beating up the President,” he added.

It’s unlikely, however, that Gingrich will take Powell’s advice and stop stirring up dust. At yesterday’s Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C., Gingrich accused HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of “Soviet tyranny” and suggested that the Congress should pass a law “that says sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States.”