Former Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the GOP against charges of bigotry, says its President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder who are 'playing the race card' and not the other way around. 'To say that we criticize, or that I criticize, Barack Obama or Eric Holder because of race, I just think it’s obviously not true,' Cheney said. 'My view of it is the criticism is merited because of performance—or lack of performance, because of incompetence. It hasn’t got anything to do with race.' Cheney addressed the subject during a 10-hour long interview with journalist James Rosen, a portion of which appeared on Playboy's website late Tuesday night. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, seen here on the set of Meet the Press in December, says it's 'obviously not true' that GOP criticisms of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are race-related . 'Certainly we haven’t given up—nor should we give up—the right to criticize an administration and public officials,' the former George W. Bush administration and George H.W. Bush administration official said after Rosen asked him if there is any 'truth' to past suggestions by Obama and Holder that Republican opposition to the president is race-related. Holder has conjectured numerous times that Republican hostility to the president and his policies are based, at least partly, on Obama's race. Obama, whose father is Kenyan, is half black. He has strongly embraced his African-American heritage, as has his wife, Michelle Obama, whose mother Marian Robinson lives at the White House with the first family and has made it known in the past that it was preferable to her  that her son-in-law wasn't 'completely white.' The soon-to-be retired attorney general is also black. He again claimed in an interview several weeks ago with Politico that racism was sometimes an underlying factor in the administration's struggles with congressional Republicans. 'There have been times when I thought that’s at least a piece of it,' Holder acknowledged. 'I think that the primary motivator has probably been political in nature … [but] you can’t let it deflect you from … your eyes on the prize.' Cheney also chastised the Obama administration in his sit-down with Rosen for habitually viewing large-scale controversies through the frame of race. Discussing the Ferguson, Missouri, shooting of a young black man by a white police officer, Cheney said he's 'been disappointed' with the executive branch's response to the tragedy. 'It seems to me it’s a clear-cut case that the officer did what he had to do to defend himself. He was perfectly within his authorities to take action,' Cheney asserted. 'That if you reach through the open car window and slap an officer upside the head and reach for his gun, you know, there is going to be a response. 'I think there should have been more people who were ready to stand up and say, “Look, the evidence is pretty overwhelming. The grand jury has reviewed it thoroughly. Here’s what we know. This is what happened.” ' Continuing, he said, the administration was wrong to have allowed race to cloud the debate. 'We should not sort of throw it all over on the burden of race, or racial inequality or racial discrimination, as being responsible for this particular event,' he argued. 'I think that would be wrong, and [pauses] it bothers me that that kind of an incident has generated that kind of response. 'I don’t think it is about race. I think it is about an individual who conducted himself in a manner that was almost guaranteed to provoke an officer trying to do his duty.' It's President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, seated here in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in February with Senior Adviser to the President Valerie Jarrett, who are 'playing the race card' and not the other way around, Cheney charged . He further took Obama to task over decisions he's made in the last six years as commander in chief, since taking the baton from George W. Bush in 2009, that Cheney, the former No. 2 government official, believes are to the detriment of America and have led to the unraveling of the stability abroad that he and Bush helped put in place. 'Oh absolutely. Where do you start?' Cheney replied when Rosen nudged him to say that Obama had 'intentionally' or 'inadvertently' undone his predecessor's work. Passing judgement on the Democratic president's handling of Iraq, Cheney said it was a 'huge mistake' for Obama to withdraw troops and 'we are paying a price for it now.' 'He’s having to go back in now, and the guy who campaigned on the basis of bring the boys home and get out of Iraq is now redeploying forces to Iraq,' he said, referencing the fight against ISIS. Obama's so-called 'apology tour' in Cairo, Egypt in 2009 was also 'a huge mistake,' Cheney proclaimed. 'I don’t think he ever bought into the notion that we’re at war, in terms of a war on terrorism; I think he always wanted to treat it as a law-enforcement problem. 'I think he’s done enormous damage to the military,' Cheney, a former defense secretary under Bush senior said, repeating old lines of attack on Obama, who had no military experience when he took office. 'The way Obama is functioning now, he’s crippling the capacity of future presidents to deal with future crises' by cutting its size. 'It takes a long time to build up that military force.' Cheney said he is 'absolutely convinced' that a future president 'will be faced with a major crisis and will not have the military capability he needs to deal with it' because of Obama's actions. 'I can go on for hours,' he said, before cutting himself off. Cheney, left, served as the vice president in George W. Bush's administration. They are pictured here talking to the press in the Oval Office in 2002 ahead of Cheney's 10-day trip across the Middle East and Europe to discuss with allies the Iraq situation . While Obama has advocated for a leaner military, it is, ironically, conservatives in Congress who are currently standing in the way of a massive increase in defense spending to replace the armed services divisions depleted coffers. Obama has called for an end to defense spending caps demanded by sequestration legislation as part of his fiscal year 2016 budget. Defense hawks on the right also want to re-up the defense department's resources. But fiscal conservatives believe that fulfilling the party's promise to balance the budget over the next decade and put a dent in the federal deficit is of greater importance. The official budget put forward by House Republicans on Tuesday leaves the sequester in place while instead expanding an overseas account for the military. The White House on Tuesday called it a 'slush fund' intended to give Republicans, generally known as aggressively in favor of the military, 'political cover' while Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, a former Republican presidential nominee' described it as a gimmick.
The criticism is 'merited because of performance—or lack of performance, because of incompetence. It hasn’t got anything to do with race,' he said . Holder has conjectured numerous times that Republican hostility to the president and his policies are based, at least partly, on Obama's race . The former vice president addressed the subject during a 10-hour long interview with journalist James Rosen - a portion appeared on Playboy . Cheney also took Obama to task over foreign policy decisions he's made in Iraq and elsewhere since taking the baton from George W. Bush in 2009 .