Keep America Scared: A Cheney Family Tradition

Liz Cheney Loves Political Infighting

Critics call her a right-wing jihadist or Sarah Palin with a pedigree: Liz, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is keeping the family tradition alive with aggression, defamation and the rewriting of history. She’ll have a remarkable political career.

It was supposed to be a backhanded compliment when one critic described Liz Cheney as “Sarah Palin with a pedigree” because of her law degree and her familial ties to a vice president. Another critic called her a right-wing jihadist, and yet another said she had the same rude manners as her father. Her propensity for getting talk show discussions red hot within seconds has all the fairness and charm of a partisan guerilla ambush.

Admirers and critics alike say the 34-year-old is Dick Cheney’s ideological heir as well as his legal advisor — and a chip off the old block. Nobody is outraged by Elizabeth Cheney Perry without granting her a certain amount of grudging respect. Those delighted that some of her positions lie further to the right of her father’s are already whispering of a possible congressional run in 2012.

The Cheneys: less a family than a combat team

The Cheneys seldom deny and never complain. Contrasted with the family of quiet retiree and memoir writer George W. Bush, they’re less a family than a combat team. Where Bush went into retirement with obvious relief, Cheney only took a short break.

Barack Obama had barely taken office when Cheney jumped vociferously back in with revisionist history. Bush/Cheney waged their “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan and thus saved America, Cheney insisted.

According to Cheney, Obama not only avoids talking about the war on terror, he also avoids waging it, preferring to work toward reshaping America according to his socialist ideals. Dick Cheney filled the leadership power vacuum in the Republican Party, and he took his daughter to the office with him.

Liz Cheney, mother of five, one-time State Department Middle East expert, has distinguished herself as her father’s most aggressive defender. She picked up her father’s key phrases and improved them. Working with allies like Karl Rove, William Kristol and Rudi Giuliani, Liz went on the talk show circuit, spreading the message that under Bush/ Cheney there had never been a terrorist attack on America. Even Rudi Giuliani, ex-Mayor of New York City and “hero of 9/11” was so bold as to claim that the 9/11 attacks were traceable to the Clinton administration. After the attempted Christmas Day attack over Detroit, the Cheneys were claiming that Obama’s cowardice in the face of the enemy had resulted in a near-catastrophe.

Family friends say that Liz Cheney is going against a long tradition of refraining from criticizing succeeding administrations publicly by urging her father to speak out. She has also persuaded him to write his memoirs. Dick Cheney’s rude manners are well known (he once openly said to Senator Patrick Leahy, “Fuck yourself.”) He ignores what others think of him and seems oblivious to his own legacy. But his daughter obviously has plans for the Cheney name.

As the world’s oldest democracy, the United States holds mild contempt for royal families and dynasties of all kinds. Or so they say. Early on, John Adams and his son John Quincy became president. The Roosevelts were related. The Kennedys endured the dynasty claim as a mortal curse. George Herbert Walker Bush and his son George W. took the supposed American allergy to inherited power to ad absurdum levels.

America’s tabloid press deliriously follows Megan McCain, Chelsea Clinton and Ben Quayle, becoming ecstatic over the smallest indications any of them might have political ambitions; it’s the same with Liz Cheney. Even her sister Mary, three years Liz’s junior who has a son and lives in a same-sex partnership, has been given the status of “political activist.”

Their mother Lynne, born in 1941, also has a long history in the same vein as the head of a conservative foundation and as an author and talk show moderator. All his life, Dick Cheney has been surrounded by strong and opinionated women. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It was Mary Cheney’s assessment in September 2009 that spoke directly from the soul to arch-conservative Americans when she said, “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any daylight at all between Liz’s and my father’s views. It’s not because she’s been indoctrinated. It’s because he’s right.”

The significant art of survival

The 69-year-old Cheney has survived five heart attacks, the first in 1978 when he was just 37 and, the most recent, a mild attack last February. The fact that he’s still alive, according to his doctors, is testimony to advancements in the pharmaceutical industry and to the early detection of coronary ailments impossible in the past. The one-time CEO of the Halliburton armaments corporation, former congressman and government official had already earned hundreds of millions of dollars before he was able to improve his pension check by serving eight years as vice president.* No one need worry about how the Cheneys are doing.

Cheney’s detractors — and there are many — consider him a “lonely, paranoid, frightened” man, as Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff described him. On the same occasion, another person described Cheney as a repugnant reptilian. Even in Washington’s always-overheated climate, it’s a rare personage who attracts similar hatred.

And Liz Cheney is heir to that. In early March, the Keep America Safe political action committee, founded by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, broadcast a television spot in which they demanded Attorney General Eric Holder release the names of seven staff members who had provided legal counsel to terrorists. In it, the narrator whispers, “Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al-Qaeda 7” as a portrait of Osama bin Laden rises in the background.

It wasn’t only liberals who considered such a defamation a descent back to the days of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Bill Clinton’s nemesis, Ken Starr, along with other prominent conservative lawyers protested Cheney’s un-American understanding of the law. Deep and blissful sighs could be heard coming from liberals in the media: Liz Cheney had shot her own political career down before it ever got off the ground. But take that with a grain of salt: if anything at all distinguishes the Cheneys, it’s their drive to survive.

*Editor’s Note: Halliburton is an oilfield technology and energy services corporation.