The Torturer’s Apprentice: Liz Cheney

Dick Cheney has long been described as being the most powerful vice-president in the history of the American republic. Over the period of eight years, it was impossible to distinguish where his authority and influence on the office of the president began and ended. It can be assumed however, that America’s long descent into unlimited war, domestic spying, wholesale torture, the escalation of Halliburton as an adjunct limb of the US military, and the myriad crony-capitalist dealings that came to typify this administration would have been different under the management of less Machiavellian operators.

It was written that Richard Nixon, another tricky Dicky, was the darkness reaching out from the darkness. Nixon, at his worst, was a paranoid and vulgar man that was obsessed with amassing power. In both Nixon’s and Cheney’s worldview, “if the President does it then it is legal!” Like Nixon, Cheney’s contempt for the constitution was legendary. His persistent attacks against the inherent constraints that limited the president’s power were exemplified in his attempts to create a unitary wartime president. Like Nixon, he was willing to fabricate evidence to support his warmongering ambitions. Like Nixon, if it meant undermining portions of the state, as when he leaked the identity of CIA intelligence officer Valarie Plame and undermined an entire clandestine network whose objective it was to actually prevent WMD dissemination, merely to prop up his overt lies, then so be it. To Dick Cheney, violations of the Geneva conventions, establishment of concentration camps, and torture to illicit false statements that would provide justifications for his previous deceit were not unethical, but the new normal and he would make no apology for his imperial excesses.

Within weeks of leaving office, Cheney went full-tilt on right-wing television to justify his actions as VP and impugn the Democrats, including Obama, as being weak on terrorism. He continued with his classic formula by levelling false accusations and once more playing the fear card by claiming that there was a “high probability” that terrorists would attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years and succeed. His maniacal aspersions continued throughout the first half of 2009. However, having earned a miserable approval rating of less than 20% upon departing the White House, Republican strategists realized that he was only reminding the public at large why they scorned him and had voted for Obama.

Liz Cheney, a chip off the old neoconservative freak show, was brought in to do what her father could not do: put a shiny lip-sticked smile on the face of evil. She is paraded out on a daily basis, as Michelle Cottle of the New Republic describes, to do “her usual song and dance about what a caring, devoted patriot her daddy is.” Of course the primary reason she and not Papa Doc Cheney is waltzed out into TV-land is because,

Everyone involved in political combat is well aware of the different rules that still apply to most female combatants--much less baby-faced blonde ones fighting for an aging, ailing daddy's honor. Men in particular must take care not to come across as bullying their fairer opponents.

This is the Republican version of affirmative action. Liz Cheney repeatedly has said, like her father, president Obama is sympathetic to terrorists, is holding hands with extremists, and is failing to protect America. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, 1 September 2009, she became apoplectic when Sam Donaldson and Stephanopoulos challenged her on the definition of torture, which she claims does not entail waterboarding prisoners; a act that strangely used to be internationally recognized as illegal when the Japanese used it on prisoners during WWII, when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, and when Latin American military dictatorships used it against their own populace.

Liz’s most recent act of naked propaganda, was saying that she thinks that Mr. Obama should, “Accept the [Nobel] prize on behalf of the U.S. military and frankly to send the message to remind the Nobel committee that each one of them sleeps soundly at night because the U.S. military is the greatest peacekeeping force in the world today.” The totality of this statement when weighed against the historical antecedent is so absurd and obscene that only the most facile minded and ignorant cheerleader of American hegemony and militarism would accept her statements as even being credible.

The fact that Dick Cheney now has to hide behind his own daughter’s skirt and that there are no elected Republicans willing to defend the history of the Bush-Cheney years, should be sufficient proof that the party has exhausted itself of any crediblity.