The twisted world of Liz Cheney
Several profiles, including this long one in the New Yorker, paint a picture of nepotism, merit-free career rides, almost pathological daddy worship and an increasingly twisted sense of reality, all wrapped up in one petite mother of five and “gutter McCarthy,” whom the extremist neocons on the right would dearly love to see as a United States Senator, or even as president. Meanwhile, the Cheney family legacy, waterboarding, is described in grisly detail in internal CIA documents, via Salon. A few chilling details: Read more
Morning clicks: Massa’s new right wing boyfriends, unqualified Liz defended
Matt Drudge gets all hot and bothered over Eric Massa and Rahm in the shower.
Burning questions for today: will newly minted right wing darling and homoeroticist extraordinaire Eric Massa flirt with Glenn Beck on Fox tonight? … Will he wind up sharing a shower with Rush Limbaugh at some time in the near future? Can a full-on affair with Matt Drudge be far off??? And what does it say about the right that they only fall in love with Democrats who act like Larry Craig?
Meanwhile, a flashback: Eric Massa attacks Rush, embraces Spitzer … Read more
Morning clicks: nobody likes Liz, frackin’ A
Has Liz Cheney finally gone too far, with her “Al-Qaida Seven” gambit? Signs point to yes. Meanwhile, why isn’t her partner in crime, neocon chickenhawk Bill Kristol getting more heat?
Meanwhile, it’s official: Eric Massa is a frackin’ idiot. And a whiner. He won’t be missed… (btw, “frak” means exactly what you think it does.) UPDATE: E.M. also knows what it’s like to argue with a naked man in the shower …
It’s not that American Taliban in custody, it’s the other one …
Put Chris Dodd down as a “yes” on the public option, bringing the Senate total to 37.
If you’re unemployed, Tom Delay thinks you’re right where you want to be …
Sarah Palin has come up with the best palm-prompter defense ever …
And before you get too comfy with Tennesee hospitality, read this.
Remainders: the right wing nut house
From ThinkProgress: surprise, surprise, the man who shot two police officers in front of the Pentagon was a right wing, anti-government extremist, whom the right will attempt to pass off as a left wing, 9/11 “truther.” John Patrick Bedell is the second white, non-Muslim, counting anti-IRS suicide pilot Joseph Stack, to commit a terrorist attack inside the United States in the last couple of months without being labeled a terrorist by the right.
Meanwhile, apparently authorities were warned by Bedell’s parents that he might be dangerous, and had bought a gun; echoes of the Abdulmullatab case, although without Dick Cheney looking for someone to waterboard.
Fox News isn’t waiting around for 2012 to urge Bobby Jindal, Bob McDonnell, Scott Brown, Marco Rubio to run for president.
Newsflash: Sarah Palin and her people are seriously, seriously tacky. And now, she’ll get the chance to be tacky in her own reality show! I vote we put it on BET… Meanwhile, the gifting victims are crying foul, and defending Sarah Hollywood from those evil, evil blogs. (Cue the Jay Leno-added, amplified applause track…)
Will Craig Crawford (whom I’ve always suspected was a Republican, or at the least, a conservative…) find “higher ground” on Fox News?
Congressman Byrd would like to welcome you to the “nether regions of Glennbeckistan…” Maybe Liz Cheney could move there with the ghost of Joe McCarthy?
And let’s throw in one Democratic story, just for fun: New York conservaDem Congressman Eric Massa is quitting, after admitting he made someone feel “uncomfortable,” in a married with children but still possibly gay kind of way … (but not as uncomfortable as this!)
Rubio and the Bushies: Cheney, Matalin and Iraq war spokesman to fundraise
Marco Rubio: a Bush restoration?
Marco Rubio is already the darling of the Club for Growth, the tea party movement, Jeb Bush and the privatize Social Security crowd. Now, he can add to his list of friends: Liz Cheney, Mary Matalin and a whole lot more. It’s like a Bush administration reunion in here, at $500 a plate!
If Pol Pot had a daughter…
… she would probably be a lot like Liz Cheney … On another note, our bridge trolly friend has launched a brand new think tank to try and keep her father’s torture and war machine alive (and to push for a brand new war in Iran.) Her partners in the new venture? Bill Kristol, right wing 9/11 widow Deborah Burlingame and a bunch of leftover advisers from the failed candidacy of John McCain. But why would anyone listen to a woman whose only claim to foreign policy expertise is that she happened to be born to the world’s toughest talking draft dodger, a man who has been wrong about literally everything he has said or predicted since reaching the age of majority, and the only 9/11 family member Glenn Beck doesn’t hate?
Liz says she wants to go back to the thumb screws and drills to the head policies that “kept us safe” under Bush and Cheney. Well … not to be mean, but I seem to recall that 9 months into the Bush-Cheney bad dream, we got attacked by al-Qaida, after Dick failed to do his job as head of Dubya’s terrorism task force, and Condi and George spent time hiking the Crawford trail instead of perusing the memo entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States…” kept us safe, you say? I say “not so much …”
Gonzo begs to differ
… with himself, over whether or not he supports a limited CIA torture investigation. Read more
The Wednesday funnies: The Cheney Bunch
**Bump** Dick Cheney’s newly public, chatty persona (and his daughter’s) just begs for a parody. Here it is:
John Landay’s Cheney smackdown. Look for the media to ignore it.
McClatchy News’ national security reporter Jonathan Landay breaks down the Dick Cheney torture jeremiad, and finds it wanting…
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense Thursday of the Bush administration’s policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that’s considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were “legal” and produced information that “prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”
He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country.”
In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”
A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.
FBI Director Robert Mueller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn’t think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.
There’s much more, but don’t expect the rest of the media to rally to Landay’s factual cause. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out earlier this week, the mainstream media has long since moved the center to the right, and adopted the Cheney version of reality when it comes to war and national security, and relegated all other versions to the fringe:
What is, in my view, most noteworthy about all of this is how it gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country’s institutions — particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media — acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it. And they still do.
Nothing has produced as much media praise for Obama as his embrace of what Goldsmith calls the “essential elements” of “the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy.” That’s because — contrary to the ceremonial displays of regret and denouncements of Bush — the dominant media view is this: the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism was right; those policies are “centrist”; Obama is acting commendably by embracing them; most of the country wants those policies; and only the Far Left opposes the Bush/Cheney approach.
Anyone who doubts that should consider this most extraordinary paragraph from Associated Press’ Liz Sidoti:
Increasingly, President Barack Obama and Democrats who run Congress are being pulled between the competing interests of party liberals and the rest of the country on Bush-era wartime matters of torture, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.
When it comes to torture and Bush’s Terrorism policies, it’s the Far Left (which opposes those things) versus “the rest of the country” (which favors them). And she described Obama’s embrace of Bush’s policies as “governing from the center.” Apparently, Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies are Centrist. Who knew?
BTW, if you caught MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning, you see Greenwald’s point. The show, which increasingly is obsessed with rehabilitating the George W. Bush presidency, with Joe and Mika pulling the wagons and only Donny Deutsch and Lawrence O’Donnell running interference for the reality based community, has now become the new, unofficial home of that nasty piece of right wing work: Liz Cheney. Today, they gave her a full hour to bond with Mika and kvetch about Barack Obama not appreciating her dad.
Liz Cheney: one nasty piece of work…
Did you catch Liz Cheney’s act on Stephanopoulos on Sunday? Sorry to be slow on the uptake, but my Tivo failed and I just caught it last night. Watch if for yourself here and here. Spoiler alert: the Cheney apple didn’t fall from the gnarled, twisted tree… If you don’t feel like clicking, here’s a small portion of the roundtable, in which Liz continues the family tradition of shoving the CIA out front as a human shield:
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