Liz Cheney group takes on 'radical' W.H.

[The Spartan]

Yahoo News

Liz Cheney takes on 'radical' W.H.
Ben Smith Ben Smith Tue Oct 13, 6:04 am ET

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s eldest daughter Liz will launch a new group aimed at rallying opposition to the “radical” foreign policy of the Obama administration which it says has succeeded only in undermining the nation’s security.

The new group, Keep America Safe, will make the case against President Barack Obama’s moves to wrench America away from Bush era foreign policy on issues from detaining alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to building a missile shield in Eastern Europe.

“The policies being proposed by the Obama administration are so radical across the board,” Cheney said. “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you want the nation to be strong and so many steps this president is taking are making the nation weaker.”

The new group will add institutional heft to a scathing critique of Obama articulated first and loudest by Liz Cheney’s father, and fills a void left by a Republican Party made skittish by the Iraq War, and apparently more eager to engage the president on domestic issues like health care. Its formation marks the end of an unusual partisan truce on America’s central national security challenge, Afghanistan, and after a presidential campaign in which Obama and Republican John McCain agreed on many security issues from Central Asia to Guantanamo Bay.

Keep America Safe will focus on issues like troop levels, missile defense, detainees, and interrogation, according to Liz Cheney, who is heading the group along with Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Debra Burlingame, the hawkish sister of an American Airlines pilot killed in the September 11 attacks.

The group, incorporated as a 501 (c ) 4 non-profit, launches its fundraising drive online Tuesday with a web video accusing Obama of failing to back up his “tough talk” and with a website aimed to provide an organizing tool for hawks.

“The Left has dozens of organizations and tens of millions of dollars dedicated to undercutting the war on terror,” said Kristol, a seasoned partisan warrior. “The good guys need some help too.”

The group’s mechanics are largely a product of former campaign aides to Senator John McCain: Michael Goldfarb, now a Weekly Standard blogger, is an adviser to the group; its executive director is McCain war room chief Aaron Harison, and the video was produced by Justin Germany, the McCain aide who produced a campaign video titled, “The One,” which mocked Obama as a messianic figure.

The Keep America Safe video - a fundraising tool that will be promoted on the Drudge Report and other conservative outlets – mocks Obama (in echoes of liberal attacks on his predecessor, George W. Bush) as a lightweight more interested in golf than in defending America.

But its spirit is very much the Cheneys.’ The former vice president assumed a high profile role last spring publicly contesting the Obama administration’s move to bring its interrogation policy in line with international law – and defending his own legacy. More recently, he’s faded into the background as Liz Cheney, deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in the Bush years, emerges as the most visible defender of that administration’s foreign policy and the most vocal critic of Obama’s departures from it.

Just Sunday on Fox News, Cheney mocked Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, suggesting that he skip the ceremony in Oslo and instead send the mother of a fallen U.S. soldier to show the importance of U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The notion that the White House says he [Obama] will go to Oslo to accept this prize just adds to the farce” she said.

Cheney said in an interview that her group’s focus is forward, not back, but that it wouldn’t shrink from defending the still-unpopular Bush era.

“The policies of the Bush administration since Sept. 11 are those policies that kept us safe – there’s no turning away from that legacy at all,” she said. “I think it’s a very important one and one where we ought to be grateful for the men and women in the military and the intelligence community and the policy makers who kept us safe.”

Cheney also cited signs that Democrats, when pushed, back quickly away from Obama’s promises, like the overwhelming Senate vote in May to block moving detainees from Guantanamo to the continental United States and a recent Pew poll suggesting that a majority support military action in Iran if other paths fail to stop the country from getting nuclear arms.

“It’s clear that there’s a real grassroots fear and concern out there. Everywhere I go people are saying to me, ‘Where can I go to learn more,’” Cheney said. “People realize what a dangerous world we live in.”

Burlingame, for her part, said the administration – like its predecessor – has given into political correctness in refusing to “name the enemy” as “a radical form of Islam.”

And she said she had been alarmed in June to find a former Human Rights Watch lawyer, Jennifer Daskal, who had battled the Bush White House on detainee policy, advising the current administration and attending a meeting with families of 9/11 victims.

“I felt very betrayed by that,” she said.

The Keep America Safe website, she said, would feature memos by Bush Administration lawyers justifying waterboarding and other practices to make the case that they aren’t torture.

Supporters “can read the memos on enhanced interrogation instead of reading them through the lens of the media where they’re called ‘Torture memos’ when, actually, they’re lawyers talking about an anti-torture statute and how not to violate it,” she said.

Kristol, asked about the group, first joked that it would serve as a launching pad for his partners’ political careers. Burlingame, however, flatly denied she’s planning a run from liberal Westchester, and Cheney, who has been mentioned as a candidate for the Senate or House from Virginia, said her ambitions have nothing to do with it.

“It’s not about me or my future as all, except to the extent it’s about my future as an American, my future as a mom who cares deeply about the world my kids will inherit,” she said.

I'm sitting here and I've typed out and then erased 4 different paragraphs now trying to express my opinion but nothing sums up what I'm saying better than just drawing attention to this quote from the article: The Keep America Safe website, she said, would feature memos by Bush Administration lawyers justifying waterboarding and other practices to make the case that they aren’t torture.

[Themightytom]

“It’s clear that there’s a real grassroots fear and concern out there. Everywhere I go people are saying to me, ‘Where can I go to learn more,’ Where can I find an internally consistent body of rhetoric that resembles reality closely enough I can pass it off as factual?” Cheney said.

Where can I learn more?? that doesn't sound like a republican

This is an interesting way to pre-emptively fundraise for her father's defense at least.

[Samuel]

Where can I learn more?? that doesn't sound like a republican

Would you like to know more? certainly fits.

Supporters “can read the memos on enhanced interrogation instead of reading them through the lens of the media where they’re called ‘Torture memos’ when, actually, they’re lawyers talking about an anti-torture statute and how not to violate it,” she said.

The fact they have to make sure what they are doing doesn't count as torture is a bad sign in and of itself.

Looking for the group gets a video, but no webpage up yet.

[Patrick Degan]

And so, the next generation of these accursed brood-vipers begins to slither onto the national stage.

[KlavoHunter]

And so, the next generation of these accursed brood-vipers begins to slither onto the national stage.

May they be less significant and influential than their predecessors.

[Vympel]

Reminds me of Hugh Hewitt, the Albino Chickenhawk, and his "Victory Caucus" from 2007.

[Darth Wong]

If only William Kristol could pay the price for his own bad calls. It's utterly amazing that someone with such a consistent history of making horrendously wrong predictions can still derive a healthy income peddling his opinions.

[Vympel]

If only William Kristol could pay the price for his own bad calls. It's utterly amazing that someone with such a consistent history of making horrendously wrong predictions can still derive a healthy income peddling his opinions.

Wingnut Welfare. The entire church of neoconservative dogma is maintained by pure nepotism - i.e. who your father was.

[Gil Hamilton]

I wonder where they are getting this "radical" nonsense about Obama? I voted for the guy and even I think he's about as radical as a bowl of cinnamon oatmeal; possibly what you need in the morning, gives off some good steam but not exactly exciting.

[Darth Wong]

I wonder where they are getting this "radical" nonsense about Obama? I voted for the guy and even I think he's about as radical as a bowl of cinnamon oatmeal; possibly what you need in the morning, gives off some good steam but not exactly exciting.

In their minds, most of the western world is "radical extreme leftist". Canada, Britain, much of Europe ... it's all a cesspool of radical leftism, on the verge of toppling in a Domino-like collapse to Communism and Islam (yes, I know, that's a contradiction).

It has been said that when others of similar values dispute your actions, you should re-examine your thought processes. One of the ways that right-wingers have reacted to international criticism from their allies is to declare that their allies no longer share their values, hence they need not concern themselves with criticism from those allies. They have isolated themselves politically, ideologically, emotionally. At this point, any reasonable person will seem like a "radical" to them.

[Ford Prefect]

You know, the truly gigantic volume of this sort of thing which comes out of America just makes it difficult to believe. It's just so systematically ludicrous that the very existence of America increasingly seems like an elaborately constructed practical joke. I try to imagine real people saying this stuff, or real people spewing the rhetoric that surrounded health care reform, or real people drawing those absurd political cartoons and I just can't do it. Even when I'm watching video of some pundit speaking about the evils of whatever it is American conservatives don't like this week, I always find myself thinking 'this is fake, right?', and even when I accept the idea that it isn't fake, I'm at a loss for how it could get to that point. I think Darth Wong's statement about the 'isolation' of right wingers from reality is reasonable, but how did they become so isolated? How is it that their particular ideology has become so ingrained and widespread?

As an outsider from the other side of an ocean, I can't be sure of the accuracy of my impression of America has a one-to-one divide between foaming at the mouth insanity and Charles Gibson.

[Patrick Degan]

I wonder where they are getting this "radical" nonsense about Obama? I voted for the guy and even I think he's about as radical as a bowl of cinnamon oatmeal; possibly what you need in the morning, gives off some good steam but not exactly exciting.

In their minds, most of the western world is "radical extreme leftist". Canada, Britain, much of Europe ... it's all a cesspool of radical leftism, on the verge of toppling in a Domino-like collapse to Communism and Islam (yes, I know, that's a contradiction).

It has been said that when others of similar values dispute your actions, you should re-examine your thought processes. One of the ways that right-wingers have reacted to international criticism from their allies is to declare that their allies no longer share their values, hence they need not concern themselves with criticism from those allies. They have isolated themselves politically, ideologically, emotionally. At this point, any reasonable person will seem like a "radical" to them.

It gets beyond merely being trapped in a disinformation loop and approaches a form of group-insanity.

[Samuel]

You know, the truly gigantic volume of this sort of thing which comes out of America just makes it difficult to believe. It's just so systematically ludicrous that the very existence of America increasingly seems like an elaborately constructed practical joke. I try to imagine real people saying this stuff, or real people spewing the rhetoric that surrounded health care reform, or real people drawing those absurd political cartoons and I just can't do it. Even when I'm watching video of some pundit speaking about the evils of whatever it is American conservatives don't like this week, I always find myself thinking 'this is fake, right?', and even when I accept the idea that it isn't fake, I'm at a loss for how it could get to that point. I think Darth Wong's statement about the 'isolation' of right wingers from reality is reasonable, but how did they become so isolated? How is it that their particular ideology has become so ingrained and widespread?

As an outsider from the other side of an ocean, I can't be sure of the accuracy of my impression of America has a one-to-one divide between foaming at the mouth insanity and Charles Gibson.

Simple. People were like this in this past. As time changed, some people noticed this and decided the change was bad and deliberately set about isolating themselves from the change in society. That and a large portion of the population are idiots and didn't see anything wrong with this- the whole over emphasis on freedom is part of the problem. It doesn't mean anything when people use it because the word has been so devalued that it only applies to themselves.

[Sarevok]

I thought Liz Cheney was a lesbian in her personal life and rather liberal to boot ? Why the sudden 180 degree about turn ?

[Bakustra]

I thought Liz Cheney was a lesbian in her personal life and rather liberal to boot ? Why the sudden 180 degree about turn ?

Her younger sister Mary is a lesbian, but Mary is, while personally pro-gay rights, about as conservative as her father and sister when it comes to, say, international relations, torture, etc. After all, she is getting involved with them in their new consulting firm.

[Edi]

As was said, nepotism. It's building profile for the next generation of neocon fuckwits.

The irony is quite delicious.

[Elfdart]

As was said, nepotism. It's building profile for the next generation of neocon fuckwits.

The irony is quite delicious.

As Scott Horton points out, Liz Cheney's real motive is "Keep my daddy out of prison!"

[The Yosemite Bear]

I wonder how long before they start adding incest to the equation...

think of it....