Now living in sweet "home" Wyoming.
Hayes Brown
points out that the website of Keep America Safe, a lightweight effort to keep alive the legacy of neoconservative Project for a New American Century, has been recently shuttered, along with the organization's Twitter account and Facebook page. The organization was primarily a project of Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol set up in 2009. Cheney announced she will run in the 2014 Wyoming Republican primary against incumbent Mike Enzi. That
hasn't made the Wyoming GOP establishment all that happy. But the handwriting was on the wall when Cheney bought a $1.9 million residence in Jackson Hole last year:
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine places the last version of the Keep America Safe website as June 30, 2013, several weeks prior to Cheney’s announcement, but at a time when buzz was surrounding the chance she’d enter the primary field. Its Twitter account—@KeepAmericaSafe—likewise appears to have had its last tweet around the same time, as the last manual retweet of the account was June 26. The group’s Facebook page has also gone missing, but ThinkProgress is currently unable to tell when that page went dark. Even their Ning, a little used social media connection site, has been taken down.
But the group's YouTube site is still
operating if you're eager to see the flavor of what the group is, or was, all about. One of the group's leaders, Debra Burlingame,
told Dave Weigel that “we succeeded in accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish.” Other than some generic ultra-hawkish sputtering, it's hard to see what those accomplishments were unless it was to give Cheney another platform from which to hiss the same message dear old dad laid out of us.
At the time Cheney and Kristol launched this project nearly four years ago, I wrote:
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.
Why the site would get scrubbed at this juncture is a bit hard to understand. Is young Cheney going to cut herself free of her dad's philosophy that had her just short of
calling President Obama a traitor: “I think in fact what President Obama is doing is something that America’s enemies—the Taliban and Al Qaeda—have been unable to do, which is to decimate the fighting capability of this nation.”
Some stuff just can't be scrubbed. But given that the conservative Enzi's not a tea party fire-breather, perhaps Cheney's consultants are urging her to adopt a more moderate stance, at least temporarily. All for the prize: a Senate seat representing fewer citizens than any other state in the nation.
Read more about Cheney's bid below the fold.
Weigel reports that the Senate battle in Wyoming may be a proxy for a fight between conservative/neo-conservative hawks and the Rand Paul factions of the party:
Like Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, a freshman who’s been nudged to run for the U.S. Senate by Kristol and others, Cheney’s seen by neoconservatives as a possible star. “She’s so good at articulating her views on policy,” says Debra Burlingame, the sister of a pilot whose plane was hijacked on 9/11 and a co-founder of Keep America Safe with the now-candidate. “I think she’ll help shore up support for what she believes and bring people back into the Republican Party, because we’re hungering for leadership. We can’t retreat from the world.” And would she stave off the intellectual challenge from Paul? “I don’t think that will be a serious factor. How many Rand Paul types are out there?”
Quite a few, actually. Wyoming wasn’t one of Ron Paul’s strongest states in the Republican primaries, but Paul did pull one-fifth of the vote and six delegates out of the March 2012 caucus. The Pauls personify a kind of libertarian “America first” foreign policy, but it thrives in the mountain west even when they’re not around. Rand Paul’s filibuster against the theoretical drone-killing of Americans at cafes was a hit with Republicans everywhere. As Reason’s Mike Riggs first noticed, one of the Republicans who praised Paul the loudest was Sen. Mike Enzi.
One can only hope the Enzi-Cheney battle devolves into the slime and that Enzi, with three terms under his belt, doesn't decide the contest isn't worth it age 70, which he will turn this coming February. It would certainly be more fun to cheer this fight if Wyoming had a strong Democratic candidate for that Senate slot. It doesn't. The executive director of the Wyoming Democratic Party notes that even if the Republican Party fractured over Enzi-Cheney, a Democratic win
would be a "long shot." The last time a Democrat represented Wyoming in the Senate was when Gale W. McGee finished his term in January 1977.