Liz Cheney inherits the family business
Dick Cheney has long criticised Obama for admitting America's foreign policy failures. Now his daughter is getting in on the actMatthew Harwood
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 15 July 2009
Once again the Cheney attack dog is on the prowl for Barack Obama. It's just not the Cheney you're thinking of. On Monday, in the Wall Street Journal, just two days after the New York Times reported that Dick Cheney concealed a secret CIA counterterrorism programme from Congress during the Bush administration, his daughter, Liz, assailed Obama on his recent speeches on US international relations.
Her argument is as simplistic as it is ridiculous: Obama doesn't spread the myth of American exceptionalism and thus engages in historical revisionism, which emboldens our enemies and hurts America. A high-level official in the Bush state department and a ferocious defender of her father's legacy, Cheney sees Obama's recent speeches in Trinidad and Tobago, Cairo and Moscow as either "an attempt to push 'reset' – or maybe to curry favour" with our enemies.
Why? Because Obama hasn't defended the standard tropes of the US cold war mythology in his own speeches or rebutted foreign leaders' less forgiving take on US foreign policy.
According to Cheney, Obama should tell our adversaries:
America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the cold war. The Soviets were not. The cold war ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat communism.
Anything less and Obama is pushing the historical "reset" button, because by proclaiming "moral equivalence between the US and our adversaries, he readily accepts a false historical narrative, and he refuses to stand up against anti-American lies." ..........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/15/liz-cheney-obama-cold-war