The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality-By FRANK RICH

[kpete]

Op-Ed Columnist
The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality

By FRANK RICH
Published: March 13, 2010

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Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.

This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.

This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin.

In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about “death panels” or “uranium from Africa,” can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.
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More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14rich.html?ref=opinion

[applegrove]

1. Jon Stewart was amazing during that intervew. He was so well informed.