Politico reports that Liz Cheney has initiated a new group, Keep America Safe. The underlying goal? Attack President Obama by incessantly reiterating the Republicans' Democrats-are-weak-on-defense canard first raised 60 years ago when the party rhetorically asked "Who Lost China?"
"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."
That would be a hoot if dad were not you-know-who. As the dark lord of a radical foreign policy for whom even the vile Bush Doctrine of preventive war was not enough, Dick Cheney did more than any single other person in the administration where he played puppet-master to undermine America's real national security interests.
Aided by Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot of Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and that old neoconservative standby William Kristol, Keep America Safe will devote itself to persuading us that using waterboarding, building missile umbrellas, keeping detainees at Guantánamo Bay and following an overtly aggressive foreign policy are good things.
Dad Cheney must be proud. And mom, too, she of the ahistorical approach to U.S. history. Not that the Cheneys invented American exceptionalism - that deep-seated and self-righteously justified operating perspective that the United States makes the global rules, enforces them but need not follow them when it decides its interests are at stake. Those interests being, most prominently, the bottom-line of corporadoes. That exceptionalist philosophy long preceded the Cheneys' appearance on the world stage.
Lightweight would seem to be the most apt description of Keep America Safe. It certainly doesn't look to be a match for Kristol's old stomping grounds, the neoconservative Project for a New American Century. And in spite of KAS's mission, it definitely won't have the heft of the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger, the group reinvented in the 1970s to try to persuade people - with hyperventilating falsehoods - that the Soviet military was much stronger than America's and that there never ever would be anybody but hardliners in the Kremlin, nobody that the West could do business with. Only war could change the USSR, they said. The CPD began for the third time in 2004, and includes our old pal Joe Lieberman among its Democratic hawks.
Thirty-three second-generation CPD members, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Casey, Richard Perle and Ken Adelman, made it into the Reagan administration. Fewer PNACers made it into the Bush administration, but they included Donald Rumsfeld, I. Lewis Libby, Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz.
In spite of being Twitter and Facebook and YouTube savvy, it's doubtful that anybody at Keep America Safe, with its emphasis on policies that have achieved the opposite of keeping America safe, will be joining any administration any time soon. But such folks - always joined in each new venue by someone from younger generations - have repeatedly proven their resilience no matter what their record of bullshit and blood.