Charlie Rose to Cheney: Would You Have Seen Iraq Differently If You Had More Oxygen to Your Brain?

October 30th, 2013 1:00 PM

On Tuesday's Charlie Rose Show, former Vice President Dick Cheney came on to promote his new book about surviving heart disease and was treated to a nasty swipe from the host about his Iraq war decision making.

When Cheney told the PBS host and co-anchor of CBS’s This Morning that he had wished he had gotten his heart transplant done sooner, Rose took a swing, meant as a joke: “Might you have seen Iraq differently if we had more oxygen to your brain?” Cheney laughed off the cheap shot. (video after the jump)

The following exchange was aired on the October 29 edition of PBS’s Charlie Rose Show:

CHARLIE ROSE: And you feel today and your prospects for, you know, a healthy life are good?

DICK CHENEY: My prospects at this stage are, the heart I have now, we did an arterial graph of it to check the arteries out. Catheterization. And it, the heart arteries are clean. I had not had clean heart arteries probably since I was 20 years old. So it’s remarkable.

ROSE: So, do you feel different?

CHENEY: Well I feel healthy and strong.

ROSE: I mean, when you were 60. Do you feel different today than you did when you were 60? When it really got bad?  

CHENEY: Well it really got bad -

ROSE: We could have had a better vice president -

CHENEY: If I had just done it sooner.

ROSE: - if you had done the transplant earlier?

CHENEY: Yeah, yeah, right.

ROSE: Might you have seen Iraq differently if we had more oxygen to your brain?