In this clip from Hardball, one of Cheney’s neo-con minions gets shut down by Chris Matthews as he desperately tries to defend his boss’s despicable plot to drag America into an unnecessary foreign war.

Matthews presents the case that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their administration lied to the American people, by fabricating a story about how Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in Baghdad had nuclear weapons and was somehow behind the 9/11 attacks as well. Ron Christie, a domestic adviser to Cheney and Bush, immediately opens up with the same old tired shots at Hillary Clinton and protesting about the “intelligence” that we now know was false and intentionally misleading.

Matthews and guest David Corn then destroy whatever was left of Christie’s argument with some clips of George Bush, and Christie is unable to give any answer as to why the Bush Administration was ignoring all the intelligence that said otherwise.

It’s well known at this point that the Bush and Cheney were talking about invading Iraq before 9/11 ever happened, that it was part of a twisted vision of the world where American democracy was forcibly imposed on the “axis of evil” regimes, and led us into one of the biggest foreign policy blunder this nation has ever seen. It’s amusing to try to see the Republican candidates grapple with the legacy of that now, but it is with heavy hearts that we watch the war criminals at fault still walk free, and observe the chaos still reigns across the region that we are partly to blame for.

Watch it here: