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Obama at the National Archives today.

If there was ever any doubt that Dick Cheney is completely unhinged, they were erased yesterday.

Immediately after President Obama gave a thoughtful speech at the National Archives answering critics on the right and the left about his efforts to balance national security with transparancy, the can’t-shut-up former Veep appeared at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington to attack it. (By contrast, former President Bush has said Obama deserves his silence as he launches his new administration.)

Read Cheney’s speech here and the Reuters story here. You can also watch the video of both speeches at the bottom of this story.

Cheney said critics of Bush administration policies were acting out of “feigned outrage based on a false narrative.” He accused his critics of ”contrived indignation and phony moralizing,” and said they “are in no position to lecture anyone about values.”

In his speech, Obama criticized the Bush administration’s  ”ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable.” The president, while not referring directly to former President Bush or Cheney, called their policies ” a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions; that failed to use our values as a compass.” He added:  ”That is why I took several steps upon taking office to better protect the American people.”

One of the starkest contrasts between the two speeches today came on the question of whether “enhanced interrogation techniques” made our country safer (Cheney’s view) or more vulnerable and lawless (Obama’s view)

Here was Cheney’s assertion:

The enhanced interrogations of high-value detainees and the terrorist surveillance program have without question made our country safer. Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place.

And here’s what Obama said:

I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence, I bear responsibility for keeping this country safe, and I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured.

Cheney fiercely defended his post 9/11 politicies (and they were Cheney’s policies, at their root, as many books investigating the post-9/11 Bush White House have shown). But he showed no glimmer of self-reflection.. As former national security White House staffer Richard Clarke and many others have recounted, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney and other decision-makers in the White House refused to even sit down for a principals’ meeting on al-Qaeda before 9/11, even as the intelligence community was on fire with threat warnings, and even though in August 2001 President Bush received a briefing entitlted, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.”

Oh, and Cheney also attacked the New York Times for its 2006 story revealing the NSA’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program. Read the Politico’s Michael Calderone’s take on it here.

Here are some excerpts from Cheney’s speech:

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about “values.”

AND

To call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.

AND

I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a differen man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watchin a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from a underground bunker at the White House can affect how you viewyour responsibilities.

AND

Over on the left wing of the president’s party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists. The kind of answers they’re after would be heard before a so-called “Truth Commission.” Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense, and political opponents as criminals. It’s hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors.

And here are the two speeches: