Cheney Backtracks on Palin Comments

Dick Cheney appears to have decided that picking a fight with Sarah Palin isn't a good idea. Speaking to Fox's Sean Hannity, Cheney backtracked from his earlier comment that John McCain's decision to run with Palin was a mistake. The comment "wasn’t aimed so much at Gov. Palin as it was against the basic process" that McCain used, Cheney said. "I like Gov. Palin," he said. "I think she's a very able and effective spokesman for the party, for conservative causes. She believes in a lot of the same things I believe in."

After Cheney's original comment, Palin hit back with a sly reference to the time he accidentally shot a friend while hunting. "Seeing as how Dick—excuse me, Vice President Cheney—never misfires, then evidently he’s quite convinced that what he had evidently read about me by the lamestream media, having been written, what I believe is a false narrative over the last four years, evidently Dick Cheney believed that stuff. And that's a shame, so he characterized me as being a mistake," she said. Cheney has been saying pretty much whatever he wants since leaving office, and his decision to walk back his Palin comment shows how much clout she still has with the GOP's base, notes the Washington Post. (More Dick Cheney stories.)