Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of creeps

By Carl

So Liz Cheney, Senate candidate from Wyoming, and sister Mary, an out-of-the-closet lesbian, have begun a war of words over same-sex marriage.

The simmering feud between the daughters of former Vice President Dick Cheney over same sex marriage has reignited on social media.

Mary Cheney and her wife Heather Poe took to Facebook to express their disappointment after Liz Cheney - a GOP candidate for Senate in Wyoming - repeated her opposition to same sex marriage during a television interview.

"Liz - this isn't just an issue on which we disagree - you're just wrong - and on the wrong side of history," Mary Cheney wrote.

In a separate Facebook post, Heather Poe called her sister-in-law's comments "offensive."

The Cheney family has struggled with Mary’s lifestyle “choice” for nearly a decade now. In terms of the potential for her marriage, you may recall in 2004 Dick Cheney was about it, and famously responded, “With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everybody.”

Apparently, the apple fell far from the tree.

It’s no secret, I think, that the Cheneys are Machiavellian by nature, with a stubborn inability to change a single opinion even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are wrong. It seems this tendency, valuable in western state politics, could come back to haunt them in their own backyards.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Mike Enzi way up on Liz Cheney in Wyoming

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Question: Who's even less popular than Dick Cheney? (Please answer in the form of a question.)

Answer: Er, how about Liz Cheney?

Bingo.

Liz Cheney's support has faded in Wyoming since the summer, according to internal polling conducted for a super PAC that's been running ads against her and shared exclusively with POLITICO.

Sen. Mike Enzi (R) has expanded his lead over the former vice president's daughter by 12 points among likely primary voters since August. The three-term incumbent was up 52 points, 69 percent to 17 percent, in a survey conducted by Bob Wickers of The Wickers Group at the end of October.

Okay, this is an Enzi-friendly poll, but still. (Other polls show pretty much the same.)

It was always going to be an uphill battle for Liz to unseat a fairly popular incumbent, but maybe it also has something to do with the fact that she's completely crazy, absolutely nuts, and downright insane.

Holding freedom hostage

By Mustang Bobby 

Paul Krugman writes that the Republicans have dusted off an old argument from years ago to block the agenda of President Obama and the Democrats. Instead of arguing the merits of, say, expanding Medicaid to people who need it, they now say that giving people a guarantee that they will have health insurance is an assault on freedom:

Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) "If you and I don't do this," Reagan declared, "then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." What you might not guess from the lofty language is that "this" — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.

These days, conservatives make very similar arguments against Obamacare. For example, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has called it the "greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime." And this kind of rhetoric matters, because when it comes to the main obstacle now remaining to more or less universal health coverage — the reluctance of Republican governors to allow the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of reform — it's pretty much all the right has.

They trot out this pony for lots of other things, too. Universal background checks and liability insurance for gun owners shreds the Second Amendment. Giving free or reduced lunches to impoverished children takes away the parents' rights to feed their children the way they see fit. Banning interracial marriage is an assault on the rights of states to protect their own traditions, and of course the one we've been hearing a lot of recently, permitting marriage equality is a blatant attempt to muzzle the freedom of the "religious" to bully and harass the LGBT community.

David Brooks' column last week where he said that granting gays more freedom actually meant less was a caricature of the argument, and this is how we know that they're getting down to the fumes. When they have to tell you that more is actually less and up is actually down; that more choice for more people is tyranny and that finding a way to stop a madman from sweeping a kindergarten with 154 bullets in less than five minutes is the last step before Stalinism, it makes you wonder at what point will it dawn on them how utterly contemptuous of freedom they really are.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Media accountability

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, I wrote about Liz Cheney's insane rant against Obama and Obamacare. The insightful health care policy observer Aaron Carroll wrote about the Reagan quote she used that freedom was over because of the evil which Cheney dare not speak its name. That evil, of course, is Medicare. Cheney conveniently left out that context for the quote because it only would have highlighted how wrong Reagan was and Cheney is with their hysterical domino theorizing.

Carroll puts it all into context:

Yes, Medicare was the death of freedom in 1961. It was tyranny. It was the end of America.

Last I checked, Medicare passed, and America is still here. Now it's Obamacare that will kill freedom, enact tyranny, and end America.

At what point do people who use such hyperbolic rhetoric stop and recognize that their dire warnings never come to pass? One would imagine that people who repeated Reagan's talking points back in 1961 might find it a bit humbling to see how wrong they were. You'd think they'd shy from repeating those arguments again.

But, no. They get op-ed space in the WSJ.

This, I think, is the real problem. No one ever loses anything because they are shown to be shockingly ignorant. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, no one wants to be around others who make them look bad. So someone like John McLaughlin is not going to fill his panel show with people who were right about the Iraq War or the housing bubble. The mainstream media will continue to be wrong about major policy issues because they don't want to admit being wrong in the past. Another reason is just that the people on the TV machine and in major newspapers are not there because they are right or smart; they are there because they are friends with with the people who run the TV stations and newspapers.

Read more »

I love the smell of desperation in the morning

By Carl 

So, how bad is it for Republicans supporting Mitt Romney?

The best they can do is claim it's still a horse race:

Want to start a business? Democrats laughed at the idea that a young man or woman might borrow money from his or her parents. The consensus at this convention was that they were entitled to take money from other people's parents. Delegates cheered at opportunities to take profits and property from the remaining, benighted, few Americans who still pay taxes instead of take taxes. 

In Charlotte, people who would never break into someone's home and take what was not theirs celebrated a government that uses tax law to do it for them. Then Clinton took the stage and, in a temporary expression of sanity, lectured Democrats about overindulging. You have to appreciate the irony in that.

Clinton said, "Don't you ever forget, when you hear them talking about this, that Republican economic policies quadrupled the national debt before I took office, in the 12 years before I took office, and doubled the debt in the eight years after I left, because it defied arithmetic. President Obama's plan cuts the debt."

The comparison was poignant: If Obama had similarly embraced Simpson-Bowles or any kind of bold deficit reduction in his remarks the following night, he would be wiping the floor with the Romney campaign. 

As if he isn't already. The only poll that shows Romney with even half a chance of beating Obama is Rasmussen, and Rasmussen is practically the house organ (heh!) of the GOP. Indeed, Rasmussen shows Obama winning handily in three key battleground states Romney must win -- Florida, Ohio, and Virginia -- thus negating the "national" polling.

More desperation: Dinesh D'Souza calls out President Obama for using the "N" word in describing his father. There's the pot calling the kettle "house." His film having tanked miserably at the box office when compared to, oh, a re-release of a film from twenty years ago, D'Souza is now reduced to rolling his hat around his hands, stamping his feet and screeching, "LISTEN TO ME!!!!!!"

According to John McCain, Obama has weakened America. I'm sure Osama bin Laden agrees, and this is good news for the McCain campaign.

The New York Times editorial board has had to try to revitalize the Romney campaign using backhanded complimenting.

They're even making up countries that stopped existing twenty years ago!

The whole "apology tour" thing has been revived in the wake of Mitt Romney's comments that President Obama has been appeasing terrorists, or some such wording, spoken just as Ambassador Stevens was being beheaded in Benghazi.

Well, I guess we now know the definition of "putting lipstick on a pig."

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Transparency, huh?

By Mustang Bobby.

Mark Thiessen, the Washington Post's newest columnist, defends Liz Cheney's witch-hunt of the Justice Department.

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would -- and rightly so.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information.

[...]

Yet for raising questions, Cheney and the Republican senators have been vilified. Former Clinton Justice Department official Walter Dellinger decried the "shameful" personal attacks on "these fine lawyers," while numerous commentators leveled charges of "McCarthyism."

This is McCarthyism in and of itself. In his opening sentence, Mr. Thiessen jumps to the conclusion that the attorneys defending the suspects are sympathetic to their clients' beliefs by comparing them to "mob lawyers" in charge of prosecuting mob cases. He carries on, citing an investigation by Fox News as his source of information that these attorneys are somehow unpatriotic, and compares the situation to the attacks when "fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack" during the Bush administration. In other words, the men who basically said that the president has the power to do whatever he wants to get information out of suspects, up to and including torture and killing, were vilified for their positions. Aside from the fact that the two situations are in no way comparable, the attorneys defending the al-Qaeda suspects were doing what lawyers do and what the Constitution requires, whereas John Yoo and Jay Bybee were clearly skating out onto thin ice, both legally and morally. And to lump David Addington, the man who helped out Valerie Plame, in with them is, to be generous, a stretch of right-wing logic that doesn't even pass the laugh test. Since Mr. Thiessen's previous employment was as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, it's pretty clear that his acquaintance with the canon of ethics for lawyers and the interpretation of the rule of law is, to say the least, problematic.

Mr. Thiessen is also ignoring the fact that a slew of former Bush administration lawyers and the Hero of the Clinton Impeachment, Kenneth Starr, think it is McCarthyism.

"We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications," wrote the 19 lawyers whose names were attached to the statement as of early Monday.

The statement cited John Adams's defense of British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre to argue that "zealous representation of unpopular clients" is an important American tradition.

The attacks on the lawyers "undermine the Justice system more broadly," they wrote, by "delegitimizing" any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether civilian courts of military tribunals.

The one thing that's clear in Ms. Cheney's crusade and Mr. Thiessen's enabling of it is that neither of them give a flying rat's ass about "transparency" or the "right to know." It's a malicious attempt to tear down the Department of Justice for political gain. It's nothing new for the Cheneys, and Mr. Thiessen is just another one of their Wormtongues.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Daddy's Little Girl launching PNAC-Lite

By J. Thomas Duffy

Oh boy, just what we need.

A new NeoNitwit outfit

From Politico this morning:

Liz Cheney's group 'Keep America Safe' takes on 'radical' White House

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.

[snip]

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.

[snip]

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.

Little Billy Kristol?

I suppose, with the record of eight failed years, he can't keep running the same failed PNAC cow chips (tell us again, Billy, how'd that "greet us as liberators" thing work out?)

So, they repackage it, and get the former Shadow President's daughter to carry the banner.

Steve Benen also sees disaster written all over this;

The truth is, Cheney/Kristol had their day. They got to do exactly what they wanted to do -- torture, preemptive war, abandoning the rule of law, abandoning democratic norms, alienating allies, ignoring the concept of international cooperation -- and they failed anyway.

[snip]

Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol have become clownish figures, so blinded by their ideology that they can't even see the dangerous ineptitude of their agenda. I don't doubt that wealthy right-wing financiers will be delighted to throw some checks at "Keep America Safe." Likewise, I can only assume that news outlets will continue to pretend that Cheney has some shred of credibility on these issues, and will have her on national television every day for the next year.

But that doesn't make this endeavor any less ridiculous.

They already have Politico, Matt Sludge, and other Flying Monkey perches lined up to promote their drivel (which means our mainstream corporate media will instantly pick up and run with their ball), and, no doubt, Faux News will be in the bag.

Hmmm...

But maybe it's all just a front.

On her website, we have this, right at the top of the home page, under "Featured Resources":

Seven former CIA chiefs asked President Obama to halt the CIA investigation that damages our national security and the personal security of CIA agents. Click here to read their plea now!

I suppose they couldn't call it "Keep Daddy Out of Jail," now could they?



(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

The un-Meritocratic States of America

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Come on... really. Jenna Bush as a correspondent for NBC's Today Show? Seriously?

This is what she's "always dreamed to do"?

And the idea just came to the executive producer of the show, Jim Bell, because she "just sort of popped to us as a natural presence," because "she knows something about pressure and being under some scrutiny," and because, in a couple of previous appearances on the show, "she knocked it out of the park."

Please. Spare us the bullshit.

She got the job because she's a Bush, because she has the right last name and the right connections, and because she has the right sort of appeal. Bell is clearly hoping viewers will tune in not because anything she has to say is all that significant -- honestly, who cares what her views are on education? how are her views worth anyone's while? is every expert in America unavailable? -- but because a Bush, the daughter of the ex-president (and a massively unpopular one at that) and a minor political celebrity (a celebrity by close family connection), will be on camera.

So what? Well, yeah, so what? I don't watch Today (a clip maybe, here and there, but that's it), and I suppose it's free to hire whomever it wants to pull in viewers, connected or not, qualified or not (not that everyone in the media is qualified, but whatever).

Let's just not pretend this is something it's not.

I think Greenwald nails it. This is all about "American royalty":

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There's a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.

*****

Liz Cheney is really the perfect face of Washington's political culture, a perfect manifestation of all the rotting diseases that define it and a pure expression of what our country has become and the reasons for its virtual ruin. She should really be on every political TV show all day every day. It's almost as though things can't really be expressed thoroughly without including her. Jenna Bush as a new NBC "reporter" on The Today Show -- at a time when every media outlet is firing and laying off real reporters -- is a very nice addition though.

Yes, she'll fit right in, a perfect addition to an already deeply corrupt media establishment.

Liz Cheney reacts to her dad's lawbreaking by calling Dems weak on terror

By Creature

For some reason I feel we've been down this road before.  Really, Liz, your dad could have killed and captured as many al Qaeda leaders as he liked, except he was supposed to follow the law while doing so.  Informing Congress is not a hard task, unless you've got something to hide or your last name is Cheney.