RUSH: Now, Dick Cheney addressed Republicans behind closed doors in Washington.

The reason he did… I think he was invited, but one of the reasons why is there are some House Republicans who are reluctant to take military action against ISIS. They’re afraid of being dragged into it and being blamed if it doesn’t work. And of course for the Republicans, you see, going back in there just revives Iraq.

Republicans in large numbers believe that George W. Bush and the Iraq war are one of the reasons why they are hated by the people of this country and by the media. And, by the way, there’s an interesting poll I have here. The Republicans ought to look at this, because it’s a curious poll. It clearly says that something like 70%, 72% of voters do not have a favorable view of the Republican Party.

But on the other hand (chuckles) the same respondents say they’re gonna vote for Republicans in November. You can look at it if you wanted to do so in the right perspective and take it as a positive. But I’m telling they’ve got PTSD over Bush and Iraq and what the Democrats and the media did with that, and they’ve got shell shock over the fact they’re still blamed for the economy, Bush is and the Republican Party is.

So any idea of going back in there has a lot of Republicans recalcitrant and not willing to go, and they also have total confidence in the fact that Obama could end up having them blamed for whatever goes wrong. They really believe this stuff. They really are shell-shocked. Plus they’ve got other things they want to take care of, which we’ll get into before the program ends today.

So Cheney was invited to go in and talk to them to try to sell these reluctant House Republicans on buying into comprehensive action against ISIS — and, of course, Cheney is trying to tell them how this must be done, but it’s all Obama’s fault. Now, Cheney, to nobody’s surprise, is a believer in military action, because it relates to American national security.

If you want know one thing about Dick Cheney, the first thing you have to do is forget everything you think you believe about Cheney that you have been told by the Drive-By Media. Dick Cheney is not Darth Vader. Dick Cheney is not evil. Dick Cheney is not even mean. Dick Cheney is serious. Dick Cheney is fearless. And he will say what many people won’t.

But he is not evil. He is not mean. He is not a totalitarian, authoritarian. He’s nothing like Darth Vader. He has nothing in common with any of the images that have been built for him and about him by the Drive-By Media. Dick Cheney is, first and foremost, an American patriot and he cares — besides his family– about one thing, and that is the security of this country and its people, the security and safety of the people of the United States.

Dick Cheney is unabashed in his view of the threats that we face.

Dick Cheney accepts those threats as real. He does not accept those threats as real as an excuse to wage war. Neither did Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney’s not a warmonger. He does not profit from war. He does not seek to profit from it. He’s strictly a patriot.

Now, if you don’t know any of this, and if you happen to be a low-information voter, you’re gonna believe the exact opposite about Dick Cheney. I’ve always been amazed how they’ve been able to construct an image of this guy as Darth Vader. Cheney doesn’t say enough. He never raises his voice. He never calls anybody names. Well, he did Patrick Leahy one day, but Leahy deserved that. He told Leahy to go, you know, F-off. Everybody loved that. ‘Cause Leahy was taunting him, a bunch of garbage, trash talk, and Cheney told him what to do. Some in the Drive-Bys heard it and that contributed to the image, as though nobody talks that way, of course, but Dick Cheney.

But Dick Cheney doesn’t want to force you to come under the control of government. Dick Cheney doesn’t want to raise your taxes. He doesn’t want you to lose your job. Dick Cheney is not all in favor of an expansionist, growing government with power and more power over people. Dick Cheney is a statesman. He’s given his life to public service and he has devoted himself to national security, and he does so seriously, and he recognizes threats. He’s very serious about threats.

It’s fashionable in America today to downplay threats. It’s fashionable to disregard them. It’s fashionable in America today to react to, “Oh, come on, you’re just being paranoid.” Hey, being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. You can be paranoid all day long and it could still be true, that they’re out to get you. But it’s fashionable to put down people who look at threats in the Middle East as real. But Dick Cheney, he doesn’t care. Another thing that angers people about him is that he does not care what leftist media or Democrat politicians say about him.

If you want to know anything about Cheney, just know that he desperately cares about national security, and he’s very worried about it, I might add. I don’t know that I should use the word “scared,” but he is extremely concerned and worried about it, because he doesn’t think the current leadership recognizes the threat, and in fact may be even worse than that. And so he’s simply trying to sound the alarm bell. So he goes to the closed-door session to meet Republicans in Washington who, for whatever reasons, are also afraid to do anything ’cause of politics.

They’re afraid they’re gonna get tarred and feathered with going back into Iraq when that was such an albatross around their necks. Well, what Dick Cheney spoke about behind closed doors to the House Republicans was the need for military action in Iraq, which of course is a politically incorrect thing to say as needed. Why, President Obama, a couple weeks ago, three weeks ago, and all of last year, Iraq’s finished, major victory, we got out of there. They’re self-sufficient, government, everything’s hunky-dory and we vanquished Al-Qaeda.

I mean, that was the Regime’s line. And in the midst of all that, here comes Cheney, nope, we gotta go back. We should never have left the way we did. Very politically incorrect to say that. Everybody wants to feel like Iraq is over and it was successful, to the extent that it could be, and then we’re gone. Now Obama’s gonna take us back in and Cheney wants to go back in.

So, “With President Obama poised to give a major speech on Wednesday about military action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Cheney spoke to the assembled Republican congressmen about the situation in the Middle East at their weekly caucus meeting. And while the GOP has been fiercely divided over foreign policy in recent years,” again, because of the aftermath of Iraq. “Cheney didnÂ’t wade into that debate, instead opting to pillory Obama in front of an audience giving him ‘rapt attention.’

“According to Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, Cheney said Obama ‘has actually done things that have supported the Muslim Brotherhood.'” He did. That’s not conjecture. It’s not theory. He did! The Arab Spring. We got rid of Mubarak in Egypt. We empowered the Muslim Brotherhood. What were we told? They’re the peaceful Islamists. The Brotherhood is the moderates. The Brotherhood we can deal with. The Brotherhood, yeah. We put them in there and we send CNN’s Nic Robertson over to Egypt to ask citizens, “Are you happy with what President Obama is doing?” Citizen, “Obama schmama.”

But Cheney’s exactly right. We’ve done things to actually support the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood ruined Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood is Hamas. They are Hezbollah. They are very close to ISIS. They’re all related, and this Arab Spring is all about the new caliphate. The Muslim Brotherhood’s right in there. Cheney went and told the Republicans, “Hey, it’s President Obama who has done things that have helped them accomplish this.”

Cheney went on to name the Muslim Brotherhood as the beginning of all the Islamist groups that we’re dealing with now, like Hamas and ISIS and Hezbollah. “In FlemingÂ’s account, Cheney said that by ‘facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood … our policies have been exactly opposite to where they should be.’ … FlemingÂ’s description of the meeting was echoed by Rep. Peter King of New York, who said that while Cheney didnÂ’t criticize ‘the Rand Paul types’ in the GOP,” the isolationists, “but he called for ‘comprehensive’ action that is even more aggressive than what Obama has in mind.”