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.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20091013/pl_politico/28212
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