Liz Cheney To Obama: You’re A Danger To America, But Do You Mind Helping Salvage My Dad’s Legacy?
You’ll be hearing a lot more of this. The Cheneys have now embarked on the next phase of their very public defense of the Bush torture program: Putting pressure on President Obama to declassify the torture intelligence that Cheney says will prove torture worked.
As you know, Cheney’s request for two CIA documents that will supposedly prove this was denied by the CIA. In an interview on CNN on Friday night, Liz Cheney demanded that Obama use his declassification powers to release those docs:
[My] dad has stood up and said: Wait a minute. If you’re going to be the transparency president, and if you’re going to libel the brave men and women who conducted this program, and if you’re going to release information that helps the terrorists, at least you ought to release the information that tells the American people what we learned from this program.
Liz’s directive to Obama came a day after Dick Cheney, during his big speech, made the same demand.
This is the next phase in the Cheney family strategy: Blame Obama for refusing to release info that supposedly proves torture works, even though the CIA nixed the release for straightforward legal reasons. The Cheneys will soon claim that Obama’s refusal shows he’s breaking his vow of transparency.
The emerging Cheney family argument, quite literally, seems to be: Obama, you’re a terrorist-sympathizer and a danger to America, but do you mind helping us salvage Dick’s legacy? Given the virtually unlimited access Liz has been granted to the cable networks to defend her dad, you’ll be hearing a lot more of this going forward.
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I keep hearing jokes that Cheney’s running in 2012. As I read Adam Nagourney today, it hit me: Liz Cheney is running for President.
Washington Whispers reported last week that her friends are privately urging her to do just that!
Wow. Okay, Greg, we’re about to get this snowball rolling.
I think she’d actually be a strong candidate. She’s sharp, tough, knows her stuff, extremely cool under fire, and puts a softer, somewhat saner face on the family’s Strangelovian worldview. I think I’ll start calling her McStrangelovin’.
I wonder how her summer vacation plans are shaping up. If there’s a Republican equivalent to Tom Harkin’s steak fry, I expect to see her there this summer.
Like I said last week, she’s confident, she has experience, she doesn’t get lost in a sentence, she’s from the right, she has five kids. Miss Almost Alaska was just the stalking horse. Liz Cheney is the real Sarah Palin.
Yes yes, PLEASE get her to run for ANYTHING. Not just President. Hell have her run for alderman. So I can see something like this happen again during a debate.
.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHMHtgPGZWY
She’s a deeply unattractive person. Her rhetoric is marked by frequent falsehoods, half-truths, strawmen, ad hominems, smears and innuendo. But the corporate world, particularly the industries that profit from militarization, would throw the big bucks her way.
Powell’s statements yesterday were tempered and rational, quite free of the purposeful misrepresentations and divisive extremisms of both Cheneys. His notions of proper leadership (and citizenship) are far closer to Obama’s notions.
But contrasting the number of media appearances by Powell and Mini-She demonstrates the propaganda expertise (and the completely amoral willingness to use it) of the GOP mandarins. Civic unity, civic rationality, and civic education are impediments and undesirable outcomes for these folks. The nation needs more sane and well-intentioned Republicans to stand up and speak out against them and their methods. And they probably need to speak out rather more strongly or more often than Powell did yesterday.
Let her run, the people are as sick of the Cheney’s as they are with the Bush’s.
Like her dad, she’s relentless, and she strikes me as exactly the person a lot of the Republicans will think is perfect to put forward as part of their self immolation strategy. But it’s still depressing to think about. She has most of the Palin politics, but nothing like the same entertainment value.
I think there’s no doubt her prospective candidacy is being polled as we speak. And her increased public profile may well be a necessary initial strategy to facilitate such a candidacy. She’d gather around her a lot of corners of the party which are uncomfortable with Palin’s intelligence, education and political acumen. It’s probably not a bad idea, politically, to push her forward.
But if that happens – that is, if the extremist and authoritarian sector of the GOP triumphs over the moderates in the next 2-4 years – then we are likely going to have to put some substantial effort into ensuring they don’t regain power. It’s not simply, perhaps not even mainly, the policies they would continue to advance, but the means by which they have developed to achieve power.
Bernie, I think it’s the situation with her that the whole is less than the sum of the parts. (The Cheney aura has got to be a negative.) But you’re right. There would be something formidable if the dark side kept working their levers of power.
Dick Cheney and his Precious. Shivvvverrrr.
Bernie Latham | May 25th, 2009 at 10:10 am
“Her rhetoric is marked by frequent falsehoods, half-truths, strawmen, ad hominems, smears and innuendo.”
Dang Bernie, there you go describing the average career politician again. And there I go again, being a cynic when it comes to politicians.
If Hillary couldn’t ride hubby’s rep to the nomination Liz sure can’t ride daddy’s.
Actuator–the Republicans often close ranks around their anointed one, witness witless (W). She may not get it, the odds are long for anybody, especially this far out, but she’s in the game, and if she starts to gain a little traction, the wingiest wingnuts could get on board with her. If a demagogue like Netanyahu can make a comeback, why not a less-growly Cheney? Although we’ve agreed that mum’s the word.
The “legal reasons” for not releasing the memos are not genuine, and indeed are laughable. The President has authority to declassify the memos whenever he wants. The lawsuit seek release of the memos as well — you can check each of the complaints if you would like. So the argument from the administration is that lawsuits seeking relase of the memos are pending, so we cannot release the memos. This silly argument only works with non-lawyers and lazy press. Dont be stupid.
WHY THE CHENEYS WON’T LEAVE THE SCENE: A QUESTION OF JOURNALISTIC DEONTOLOGY!
The recent appearances of the Cheneys over the media as a credible political opponent on par to the Obama administration’s policies and stances raises an issue of journalistic deontology! This is definitely of artificial making. On the one hand, we’ve got a legitimately elected President of the United States who has undergone the rigorous electoral process having to make his case to the American people and coming out successful in eliciting the policies he intends to carry out during his mandate within the confines of the American political institutional structure and process. On the other hand, we’ve got political personae (the Cheneys) who are effectively being presented by the media as a legitimate opponent on par to the Obama administration whereas they do not bear any electoral mandate whatsoever for the political views they profer and with no consequent responsiblity, stake and risk that will arise from any such mandate while the President is tied to them.
The latest case in point, is Liz Cheney’s appearance on the Scarborough Show with her critical and undermining views of the President presented in effect as critical views to the Obama speech delivered in Egypt under the disguise of expressing her opinions. For comments/expressions of opinion on the President’s policies, her views as well as those of her father have been given such a broad artificial reception by the media that runs very contrary to the expression of opinion as we’ve come to know it. These views are rather given almost the same weight and placed on par as the political stances of a legitimately elected president with a legitimate mandate for the policies he is undertaking while the Cheney’s hold no such legitimate mandate and with no accompanying political accountability whatsoever. The issue here is that such attitude by the media is contrary to what we’ve come to expect from normal implicit democratic rules. If the Cheneys had any pretense for policies they wished to be implemented after the Bush Administration, the solution would have simply been for Dick or Liz to run for president. Since they didn’t, it is artificial for the media to strive to present them as a counterweight on par to the Obama administration’s policies well beyong what will be expected for the opinion of a simple citizen that the Cheneys are now notwithstanding their previous political roles. And by the way, by extension is it acceptable that any citizen, no matter what self-righteous pretense they might have, to be artificially given a similar counterweight role on par with the President on any policy issues of the Obama administration while not holding any legitimate political mandate for which they will be politically accountable for their stances? It can be understandable, that the Cheneys can be of direct concern when it comes to matters of direct relation to political issues having to do with Cheney’s role in the Bush administration. But to raise their views on the policies and stances the administration should take on par with the President undermines appropriate journalistic deontology because as we should all know by now “elections do matter”.
What strikes the mind here is that the Cheneys have perfectly understood this “naïvété” of the media and are using this “media confusion about fairness” to artificially strive to extirpate Mr. Dick Cheney from accusations of introducing torture policies during the Bush Administration among other political accusations. Their strategy is very simple. Legally, Cheney can’t make it (they know that secretly). In all courts of law, so-called EITs are definitely torture practices. Besides, the facts as we know them are overwhelmingly against him and the Bush Administration, and Dick Cheney’s contradictions are extensive. The real strategy of the Cheney’s here is totally otherly: turn it “political”. First, saying torture works and was for the good of the country should elicit the fervour of many Americans. Afterall, all what is needed is that a substantial number of Americans polled buy to this argument, and then the issue’s legal underpinning may be undermined. Secondly, posing artificially as the right wing counterweight to the Obama’s administration policies elicits the impression and fervour in some quarters particularly to the right that he is making the President moderate and thus he is political useful. A look at this second political trick shows how the media has effectively been manipulated: knowing fairly well that in his administrative role the President will have to take practical and pragmatic postures with respect to the release of photos of abused detainees as well as on other policies, all what Dick simply have to do is to posit that he is against releasing the pictures and pretend to take critical policy issues postures on the right, making him seemingly a moderating influence on the President. Thirdly, the Cheneys simply have to claim that Obama is following the Bush Administration’s policies he criticized pointing to his strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. In this case too, the media is manipulated as they ignore the fact that the Obama administration does not have the luxury of starting from scratch as Bush had on all these issues but rather adopts a “course correction strategy” of the situations to bring them as close as possible to what he advocates. The fact is that, the underlying strategy of Dick and her daughter is to make this three steps political trick extirpate Dick from the accusations levied against the former administration. The sad thing is that the media is “naïvely” falling for these political tricks!