Vice President Dick Cheney turned up the heat on congressional Democrats Friday for “playing political games” instead of passing bills to fund the military and federal government.
“This is the worst Congress in more than 20 years in terms of getting appropriations bills,” Cheney told radio talk show host Mike Gallagher here. “That’s their basic business that has to be done every year. They know it has to be done.
“They’ve got to fund the military; they’ve got to fund all the agencies of the federal government,” he said. “They have not yet to date gotten a single bill to the president’s desk that he can sign in the appropriations area. What they’re doing instead, though, is playing political games.”
The broadside was the latest in a series of increasingly blunt attacks on Democrats by Cheney and President Bush for failing to appropriate money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After the radio interview, Cheney told the World Affairs Council that China and Russia need to “step up and be counted” in the international effort to convince Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions.
Cheney was criticized by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who is running for president, for opposing direct U.S. talks with Iran. Obama lamented that Iran once tried in vain to help the U.S. on the issue of Afghanistan.
“They were willing to talk without preconditions and George Bush and Dick Cheney rejected those overtures,” he told MSNBC.
