In US, Battle of Blondes to Revive Republicans

The new torchbearers for the Republican party are two blondes with famous surnames — Cheney and McCain — and competing visions about how to revive American conservatism in the age of Barack Obama.

Liz Cheney, 42, the eldest daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, is contemplating a political career of her own now that her father’s White House years are over. “It’s an honourable profession and it’s something I may want to do, if I can persuade my five children to be my campaign staff,” she said in an interview.

Cheney, whose youngest child is only two, vigorously disputes the notion that the Republicans are as rudderless and stuck in the past as British conservatives were after the fall of Margaret Thatcher.

“We’re really in a pre-Thatcher moment,” she said. “If you look at what the Obama administration is doing economically, we may get to a point where we have the American equivalent of British socialism in the 1970s.

“The Obama administration is moving so far left on economic issues, there may be some very direct parallels between the circumstances which allowed Margaret Thatcher to come to power and put Britain on the track to have a successful economy.”

Cheney scored a notable victory last week when she dived into the controversy about whether the White House should release photographs of prisoner abuse by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was becoming “fashionable” to “side with the terrorists”, she said with steely clarity. The swipe was every bit as deadly as her father’s claim that Obama’s policies were making America less safe.

In the opposite corner is Meghan McCain, 24, the feisty, politically moderate blogger and daughter of John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate. She told Dick Cheney brusquely: “You’ve had your eight years — go away.”

While Meghan is fast becoming a media celebrity for her outspoken views supporting of gay marriage and stem-cell research, she is short of admirers among the party faithful. Her own father admitted as much when asked whether she was a “future maverick in training”. “Maybe, maybe,” McCain laughed.

“Liz Cheney shows how you make mincemeat out of liberals. Don’t accept their fallacious premises. Don’t cop to an attitude that they’re better than everybody, or that you don’t have a chance. They’re not grounded in any substance whatsoever. Liberalism is itself in quicksand. There is no truth behind it. Liberalism is a series of mirages and images and PR.” -Rush

Liz Cheney Conducts a Clinic on How to Destroy Liberal Arguments
Friday, May 22, 2009 http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_052209/content/01125108.member.html

Liz Cheney Shows How to Destroy Liberal Arguments Audio clips available for Rush 24/7 members only — Join Now!

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want you to hear Liz Cheney. We have her on Good Morning America today. She was on MSNBC this morning and CNN last night. The first one is Good Morning America. The West Wing writer, Lawrence O’Donnell, was frothing at the mouth yesterday over Dick Cheney’s speech. He and the former deputy assistant secretary of state for near-eastern affairs, Liz Cheney, were discussing torture on Good Morning America. Lawrence O’Donnell said — talking about waterboarding here — “It is torture. This government’s prosecuted people in the past for doing exactly this, but Dick Cheney believes it’s not torture and that’s essential to his position. If it was effective, why didn’t they use it on the 500 people that Bush-Cheney released from Guantanamo, 75 of whom we know now have gone back into the terrorism business. That was a failure of the Bush-Cheney administration to keep America safe by processing people correctly at Guantanamo. Is that accurate?”

[]LIZ: Let me go through all of the inaccuracies in what you’ve just said. First of all the question of whether or not enhanced interrogation is “torture” has been answered and it’s been answered legally and it’s not that Cheney or President Bush or anybody else “believed” it to be torture. The justice department of the United States —

O’DONNELL: (interrupting)

LIZ: Lawrence, I let you go.

O’DONNELL: Are you afraid of waterboarding, Liz?

LIZ: No. Waterboarding is not torture.

O’DONNELL: (pompous laugh)

LIZ: You know what, though? I would refer you to Attorney General Holder’s testimony —

O’DONNELL: Why has this country prosecuted people for waterboarding?

LIZ: Lawrence?

O’DONNELL: Why did we do that?

LIZ: Because they did a number of other things in addition to waterboarding. Attorney General Holder had a hard time explaining exactly what the legal definition is of waterboarding that would make it torture. We’ve done it to our own people. Secondly, your argument about why didn’t we do it to 500 other people proves our point. It was used in three cases when we had terrorists who had information about potential attacks on the United States of America. So the notion that somehow, you know, we should have waterboarded everybody? I’m surprised that that’s a position you’ve taken.

RUSH: That’s Liz Cheney demolishing a popular left-wing liberal, Lawrence O’Donnell. I mean, I don’t even need to translate what she said. It’s just priceless. It is a blueprint for how all Republicans ought to not be on defense, not be nervous. Be confident of the things they believe in and have done policy-wise, and don’t accept the BS premises put forth by liberals. I do want to expand on something. She talked about Attorney General Holder having a hard time explaining exactly what the legal definition is of waterboarding. This was actually quite good. It was a hearing this week. I think it was this week. It might have been last week.

Louie Gohmert was questioning him and one other member of Congress. The name escapes me. Gohmert’s a former appellate judge, and they zeroed in on Holder. Holder was destroyed in a Q&A about waterboarding and “torture” in general. It boiled down to a position that the administration has taken — and that, by the way, is legal doctrine. It is a legal doctrine that was evolved during the Bush administration. The Obama administration has adopted it and continues to use it, and that is it can’t be torture if the interrogators do not intend torture. If they’re waterboarding somebody, for example, and they don’t intend permanent harm or physical harm that has any lasting effect — psychological, whatever — if they do it then there’s no torture. They pointed out to Holder that Navy SEALs go through it as training.

A lot of military people go through it as training for if they are captured. And how to resist it. And so they asked him, “Are you saying we’re torturing our own people?” And Holder had said, “No, because when we waterboard SEALs we’re not intending to harm ‘em.” Well, we weren’t intending to harm Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We were trying to get information from him! We weren’t trying to harm him. So Holder was totally defeated on the whole notion of torture. This was not reported in the Drive-By Media. Lawrence O’Donnell has no clue that it happened. He has no clue that Obama’s own attorney general has been defeated demonstrably on the whole concept of waterboarding being torture.
But Liz Cheney knew, and so she hit O’Donnell with it. So the whole notion that waterboarding is torture is not even an official legal position of the Obama administration. It may be a political statement that he makes, you know, he says one thing, does another. Constantly. Like yesterday in that speech, he said, “I don’t want to litigate the past eight years,” and then the rest of the speech of is berating the past eight years. Well, anybody can do that. I wonder if I could get away with that. “Folks, I don’t want to spend the show today talking about Barack Obama. I really want to move forward. I don’t want to mention Obama, and then spend the rest of the show talking about Obama. I wonder if I would be called a hypocrite? Barack Obama said yesterday, “I don’t care about the last eight years. I don’t want to litigate whatever happened. I want to move forward.”

And then he went backwards and ripped the Bush administration every opportunity he got, and nobody calls him on it. So all of these robot spokesman like O’Donnell go out there and repeat the political position of waterboarding that Obama repeats with no knowledge — or if they have knowledge they selectively ignore it — of the legal position this administration’s taken on waterboarding, which is not torture. Liz Cheney just demolished O’Donnell on this. I mean, he started interrupting her trying to humiliate her with such questions as, “Are you afraid to call it waterboarding, Liz?” “No, no, no. I’m not afraid,” and in the last half of the bite you don’t hear him pipe up with anything. Let’s move on to MSNBC to Scarborough’s show today, and they have a discussion of “torture.” This was Liz Cheney with CNBC’s Donny Deutsch, who came to broadcasting from the world of advertising. And Donny Deutsch, in typical uninformed, ignorant liberal arrogance, says, “Either your dad’s lying or the president’s lying. Who’s lying?”

LIZ: Well, the president could, you know, resolve this this morning and —

DEUTSCH: No! No! No! No! But he came out and he said, “I have looked at those intelligence reports.”

[]LIZ: Well, I think actually what he said was I’ve seen “the” intelligence reports. So it’s not clear to me he was actually referring to the same things my dad was but —

DEUTSCH: Don’t you think at this point —

LIZ: — let me finish the answer on this, Donny.

DEUTSCH: — he would have seen...?

LIZ: No, no.

DEUTSCH: This is a critical report!

LIZ: I’m sure —

DEUTSCH: He would have seen one way or the other?

LIZ: I’m sure he has at this point.

DEUTSCH: Yeah!

LIZ: If you release the memos, then you and I don’t have to have this argument about who’s telling the truth. We could all look at it for ourselves, and that’s where I think, you know, the administration’s got a real problem. Because they haven’t been able to explain to the American people why they’re willing to release information that talks about how people were interrogated without putting out the information that shows what we gained from those interrogations.

RUSH: See, the point of this is that Deutsch and MSNBC and Obama don’t care about ending the debate. They want to politicize everything so that they can argue and discuss it politically, which means constantly criticize Republicans — Cheney particularly here — and what Liz Cheney is pointing out, “Look, Obama can settle this argument. Obama can settle it by releasing the memos my dad says he saw and if those modems don’t say what my dad says he saw, then guess what? My dad’s going to be perceived as wrong. But if those memos do say what my dad says then Obama is going to be the one that’s misrepresenting things. But Donny, don’t argue with me! Just have Obama release the memos.

“The truth is there. It’s the White House that’s preventing us from knowing it.” Now, she’s got guts and courage here. (chuckling) I was her dinner partner one night out in Wyoming at a dinner party. It was a social thing; it was a political thing. But as you can expect political things ended up being discussed. And she was on fire. This woman is committed. She is informed. She is a warrior, a warriorette on this stuff. It’s great that she’s out doing this now. Somebody made a point today, I forget who, that we’ve had all these presidential children, and the sons of presidents, you know, are dime a dozen. They’ve come and gone, the daughters and so forth, and they’ve always held out potential.
But Liz Cheney happens to be the most worthwhile in terms of political asset to her father. She’s vocal, intelligent and effective. This is so breathtaking to watch because it is a seminar on how any Republican appearing on any of these shows with any of these bumble-head liberals will handle ‘em. Two more. Last night on Anderson Cooper 180, he said, “There are techniques which have been around. The Nazis used them, the Khmer Rouge used them, the North Koreans used them. So it’s not as if terrorists were unfamiliar with these techniques. If they wanted to train for them — and I’m not sure you really can train for torture or enhanced interrogation...”

[]LIZ: I would question the premise here. The legal memos are very clear, and this was a very carefully designed program, and it was a program that the CIA designed, that they had the lawyers look at to make sure that the line that divided sort of rough treatment from torture wouldn’t be crossed. What the president has done is ensure that no future president can use any of these techniques. So that’s a big step, and that’s a step that I think really does endanger the country — and, frankly, if the president himself in the future is faced with a ticking time bomb scenario, it’s not clear to me, you know, what exactly he will do even these reserved to himself the light to take action like these.

RUSH: That’s another excellent point. She points out, first, that his premise is wrong. “Let me set you straight here, Anderson.” She doesn’t say this but what we all know is: “Anderson, you’re part of groupthink. You’re part of the liberal conventional wisdom, and that’s all you know. As a modern-day journalist, Anderson you’re a walking cliche. Let me correct the premise of your question,” and then she says, “Even though Obama has reserved for himself the right to use these techniques, we still don’t know that he will” because of the way he’s politicized the issue. By the way, the member of Congress that was questioning Holder in addition to Louie Gohmert was Dan Lundgren, the former attorney general from California. It was a tag-team extraordinaire. When Gohmert called Holder on the contradictions that he was explaining about intent — what’s torture, what’s not — he was really twisted in knots.

Holder tried to change the legal definition of torture in the middle of the interview or the interrogation of... Yeah, “the interrogation.” We’ll call it that. It was a hearing. But they made mincemeat of him. It’s not hard to make mincemeat of liberals. All you’ve gotta do is don’t cop to an attitude that they’re better than everybody, or that you don’t have a chance against them or they’re all going to gang up on you because, folks, they’re not grounded in any substance whatsoever. Liberalism is itself in quicksand. There is no truth behind it. Liberalism is a series of mirages and images and PR — and the truth does not need a majority to win, as Liz Cheney is illustrating. She’s going on these programs solo, ganged up on by at least two and maybe more people who oppose her and she’s wiping them out with something as simple as the truth. She often starts by refusing to debate their cliched, fallacious premises. Here’s another example. One more before we go to the break. Anderson Cooper: “More than 100 people are known to have died in US custody, some that were ruled a homicide. If these were tightly controlled things, how come so many people are murdered in US custody?”

LIZ: Anderson, I think that your question is highly irresponsible.

COOPER: Why?

LIZ: Because you are contemplating things that aren’t conflated. When somebody dies or is “murdered” in US custody then we are a great nation and we take the people who are responsible and we put them on trial as you’ve seen happen throughout the last eight years. That is not the enhanced interrogation program, and to somehow suggest that those two things are the same I think willfully conflates something and ends up in a situation where we aren’t able to take a truthful look at the last eight years as we go forward, because we are muddying the waters about what really happened.

RUSH: Anderson Cooper’s there saying, “What’s my next question?” Yeah, he’s trying to probably figure out what “conflate” means and so forth. But what she’s talking about here, he asked this loaded question, a hundred people died in US custody. And what he’s implying is it happened because we waterboarded them or we tortured them. She said, “No, no, no. Your question is fallacious. The premise is irresponsible — and whenever these kinds of things happen we have prosecuted.” All you’ve gotta... We even prosecute the innocent, thanks to Jack Murtha. The Marines in Haditha. Congratulations, Liz Cheney, showing the way.
END TRANSCRIPT bttt

Read the Background Material...
• HotAir: Liz Cheney to Obama: Stop Letting the Polls Shape Your Policy on Terror
• National Review: On ‘Torture,’ Holder Undoes Holder
• FOXNews: Holder Tongue-Tied Over Waterboarding
• NewsBusters: Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC: Cheney Speech ‘Sleazy,’ ‘An Abomination’

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