Joe Biden and Dick Cheney talk terrorism and war, and agree on little

The Democratic vice president and the Republican he replaced found little common ground in a spectacle that played out over three morning TV programs.

A rare zone of agreement was the Obama administration's prosecution of the war in Afghanistan. But even then, Cheney suggested President Obama should have acted faster in deciding to send in more troops.

"I thought it took him a while to get there," Cheney told ABC News' "This Week."

Biden, speaking from the Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada, appeared live on CBS' "Face the Nation" and on a taped segment on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Biden told CBS that the country's biggest threat was from Al Qaeda metastasizing into small-bore operations arising from the Arabian Peninsula.

But Cheney said he thought another Sept. 11-caliber attack was in the cards and that it was "dead wrong" to think otherwise. He warned that the next large-scale attack could involve a nuclear weapon or biological agent and said the Obama administration needed to do everything it could to prevent it.

Cheney has been a loud and frequent critic of the Obama administration, saying it has been soft on national security matters.

Biden sought to rebut that view.

"We are at war with Al Qaeda, and we are pursuing that war with a vigor like it's never been seen before," Biden said. "We've eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates. . . . They are on the run."

Then he took a jab at Cheney, saying he was either "misinformed or he is misinforming."

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