Dick and Liz Cheney attack Obama leadership in new book

The next book by former Vice President Dick Cheney is aimed directly at President Barack Obama.

Cheney's "Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America" will be published on Sept. 1 by Threshold Editions, the publisher announced Tuesday. The book, co-authored by Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney, contends that Obama has abandoned a decades-long tradition of American global leadership. In a statement issued by Threshold, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, the former vice president said Obama had "significantly diminished" U.S. power at a time of a "rapidly growing" terrorist threat.

Cheney, a Republican, has been an emphatic critic of Obama, a Democrat, recently calling him the worst president in his lifetime. Cheney's previous books include the memoir "In My Time" and "Heart," about his long battle with cardiac disease.

Dick Cheney penned an oped in the Wall Street Journal last June, "The Collapse of the Obama Doctrine," that hints at the direction his book is likely to take. 

Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not "decimated." They are emboldened and on the march.

The fall of the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul and Tel Afar, and the establishment of terrorist safe havens across a large swath of the Arab world, present a strategic threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Obama's actions—before and after ISIS's recent advances in Iraq—have the effect of increasing that threat.

Of course, there are some who see Obama and Cheney as cut from the same cloth. In an Atlantic article, Conor Friedersdorf, asserts: 

For all their substantial differences, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama share one leadership trait: they trust their own judgment so thoroughly, and value it so highly, that they recklessly undermine all institutional and prudential restraints on their ability to exercise it whenever they see fit. Indeed, like Kobe Bryant at the end of a playoff game, they both harbor a barely suppressed, supremely arrogant belief that behaving in this way is their responsibility, or even their burden.