ERIC BOLLING: Let’s talk about these drastic cuts in military [sic]. Weigh in on that. Do we become a much more vulnerable nation?

LIZ CHENEY: There’s no question. I think in fact what President Obama is doing is something that America’s enemies — the Taliban and Al Qaeda — have been unable to do, which is to decimate the fighting capability of this nation.

Cheney went on to conflate Iraq and Iran — asserting that “Iraq is months, not years, away” from enriching the uranium required for a nuclear weapon — and claimed that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey hadn’t clearly stated that the U.S. would respond militarily if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Watch it:

Indeed, Obama proposed a $487 billion cut to military spending, but Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey told a Duke University audience yesterday, “This is something we the Joint Chiefs have endorsed as best for America.” He did not comment on whether the cuts in defense spending would serve the interests of the Taliban and al Qaeda but he also said last week that the military’s leadership is supportive of Obama’s plan and, not as Liz Cheney suggests, suffering a “decimat[ion]” of their fighting capability.

Cheney also got it wrong on the statements issued by Dempsey about the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday, the New York Times reported:

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this past weekend that the United States would “take action and reopen the strait,” which could be accomplished only by military means, including minesweepers, warship escorts and potentially airstrikes. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told troops in Texas on Thursday that the United States would not tolerate Iran’s closing of the strait.

While Cheney is broadening her professional credentials, her debut appearance as a Fox News contributor showed her as a commentator who pays very little attention to the administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s actual positions on the issues she covers.

Citing Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009 in which he criticized the Bush administration for “overreacting to the events of 9/11″ and called for a ban on torture when “we [the Bush Administration] were never torturing anyone in the first place,” Cheney said he felt that Obama owes the Bush administration an apology. Insisting that enhanced interrogation techniques helped identify the location of Osama bin Laden, his daughter Liz Cheney added that “he slandered the nation” in Cairo and “he owes an apology to the American people”:

Watch it:

For the record, the Bush administration actually admitted to using torture techniques in 2008 and, as Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted, those techniques did not lead to the location of Osama bin Laden.

If casualty numbers are of any significance to Kristol and Cheney then they should examine the dramatic increase in American deaths occurring during the Obama administration’s 30,000 troop surge announced in December 2009. At the time, Kristol and his fellow hawks embraced the president’s announcement and heralded him as a “war president.” Recent casualty figures show 1,002 U.S. troop died in Afghanistan under Obama and two-thirds of all American casualties in Afghanistan occurred during this presidency.

The contradictions in the ad go even deeper when examining the role played by neoconservatives, such as Kristol, in diverting U.S. troops and resources from Afghanistan by advocating for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Middle East Progress director Matt Duss wrote in 2009 that neocons like Kristol were asking the U.S. military to, as Keane put it, “do more with less”:

The broad consensus among national security analysts and aid officials is that the diversion of troops and resources toward Iraq beginning in 2002 was one of the main reasons the Taliban and Al Qaeda were able to to re-establish themselves in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, facilitating the collapse of the country back into insurgent warfare.

The conclusions worth drawing from the latest Keep America Safe ad is that individuals like Kristol and his allies care very little about American casualties, oppose any withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan and will attack Obama for exercising his constitutional authority instead of handing all decision making powers to his generals. Unfortunately, their arguments rely on the ad’s viewers having a very short memory about the history of U.S. involvment in Afghanistan and the unhelpful role played by Kristol.

But Edith Bartley, who lost two family members in the bombings and has emerged as a de facto media spokesperson for other families of victims, tells Adam Serwer in an interview that the families don’t fault the Obama Justice Department’s handling of the case. She also called on critics of Justice’s conduct to stop turning the trial and verdict into a “political issue,” which she denounced as “unacceptable.”

“We thought it was most appropriate,” Bartley said of the decision to prosecute Ghailani in civilian courts. “He was part of the original indictment in 2001, where four members of al-Qaeda were tried and convicted of these bombings. At that time he was at large, he was apprehended obviously years later, so it was most appropriate to have him in federal court.” [...]

“To make it a political issue is not at all the appropriate position for any of our lawmakers or others to take. That to us is really unacceptable.”

This comment suggests an alarming fatalism on the part of President Obama and his administration. Once again the President seems either unwilling or unable to do what it takes to keep this nation safe. The President owes the American people an explanation.

Recall, Cheney’s father — the former vice president of the United States — told Meet the Press’s Tim Russert in 2002 that another terrorist attack was “almost a certainty.” He added it that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. got hit again:

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: The prospect of another attack against the United States is very, very real. It’s just as real, in my opinion, as it was September 12.

TIM RUSSERT, NBC News: Not a matter of if, but when?

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Not a matter of if, but when.

Is Liz Cheney outraged that her father stated that another terrorist attack on the homeland is a certain eventuality? She’s probably unaware that the Bush White House put out the following national security document that laid out a strategy of being “better able to absorb the impact” of a terrorist attack:

For each CI/KR [critical infrastructure and key resources] sector, we must collectively work to ensure the ability of power, communications, and other life sustaining systems to survive an attack by terrorists, a natural disaster, and other assessed risks or hazards. In the past, investments in redundant and duplicative infrastructure were used to achieve this objective. We must now focus on the resilience of the system as a whole – an approach that centers on investments that make the system better able to absorb the impact of an event without losing the capacity to function.

Perhaps Liz Cheney should demand an explanation from her father.

Naturally, right-wing opponents of the mosque blasted Pelosi for the comments, claiming the opposition is an organic, spontaneous uprising of concerned Americans. However, the coalition leading the charge against the mosque, the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero, appears to be funded by a major neo-conservative advocacy group, with deep-pocketed donors, and extensive connections to the conservative establishment. As Glenn Greenwald noted, the coalition’s website StopThe911Mosque.com is registered to the Center for Security Policy, a neo-conservative think tank and advocacy group run by Reagan defense official and far-right hawk Frank Gaffney:

The coalition’s partners include a who’s who of far-right pundits, politicians, and neo-conservative advocacy groups, such as Keep America Safe, the attack group formed by Liz Cheney and hawkish Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. Another coalition partner is 911FamiliesForAmerica.org, a group run by Tim Sumner and Debra Burlingame, who also happens to be a founding board member of Keep America Safe.

The Center for Security Policy, of which Gaffney is the founder and president, appears to be leading the charge, thanks to its network of big-time right-wing funders like the Bradley Foundation and, presumably, its board of directors. Gaffney’s board includes the vice president of Van Scoyoc Associates, which touts itself as the “largest independent lobbying company in Washington, D.C,” with numerous defense clients and $15.93 million in lobbying revenue over the first six months of 2010. Other members of Gaffney’s board include the former vice president of Boeing’s missile defense division, and the head of the investment firm American Securities LP, which is invested in, among other companies, Potbelly’s Sandwich Works. The group paid Gaffney $288,300 in 2008, according to its most recently available 990 form.

Another partner in StopThe911Mosque.com is the anti-Muslim hate group ACT! For America, whose “radical Islamophobe” founder Brigitte Gabriel has said that Muslims should not be allowed to hold public office, and that an American Muslim “cannot be a loyal citizen” because Islam is the “real enemy.”

Gaffney himself has long history of advocating outrageous and bigoted positions about Islam, and has repeatedly questioned President Obama’s birthplace and religion.

The StopThe911Mosque.com campaign reflects Gaffney’s radical views, declaring that it is not opposed to only the “mega-mosque and Islamic Center at Ground Zero,” but to many mosques, because they may be “‘Trojan Horses,’ masquerading as places of worship when they in fact have proved to be sources of extremist activities and terror plots against America.” The New York mosque is just “a prominent example of this kind of ‘Trojan Horse.’” Indeed, the website also targets mosques in Boston and London.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Liz Cheney took issue with Gibbs’ comment:

CHENEY: You’ve also have Robert Gibbs this week, when asked what does it mean if 71 percent of the people in Missouri said they don’t want any mandate for health insurance, he said, “it means nothing.” Now when you have a White House that is that unwilling to listen to what people out there are saying, I think, you know, it causes some real concern about whether or not they are actually going to be responsive to the voters.

Watch it:

If Liz Cheney is concerned that the White House isn’t listening to what the American people are saying — really only a small number of mostly Republican Missourians — she must have been really troubled when her father dismissed in 2008 polls showing that Americans opposed the Iraq war:

MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC): Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

DICK CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

But the reality is that recent polling shows that Americans are giving the new health care reform law increasing support. Kaiser Family Foundation polling has found that “overall public support for the health reform law is steady from June, while unfavorable views of the law have trended downward.”

In another flashback to the Bush years, Cheney criticized President Obama’s comment last week that the GOP “can’t have the keys back” to running the country because Republicans “don’t know how to drive!” “You have the President saying you can’t have the keys back like he’s the decider,” Cheney grumbled.

The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and Keep America Safe’s Liz Cheney picked up on this meme yesterday on Fox News Sunday’s online “Panel Plus” edition. Cheney went so far as to say that a founding principle of the United States should not apply to Abdul Rauf:

KRISTOL: It’s just ludicrous. That’s not — his intention is not a good intention. Whether it can be stopped legally, I don’t know. Can people appeal to him and say, as the ADL did, to say, “This is counterproductive by your own…” — leaving aside his funding which is dubious and has terror-related connections, leaving aside past statements of him — “…is this the right thing to do?” I mean really.

CHENEY: I think that it’s exactly those things, the issue of his funding, and the issue of his past statements that take this out of the realm of freedom of religion. When you’ve got an Imam that has got the very questionable and dubious ties to radical Islamist organizations that this man does, saying he’s going to build a mosque at Ground Zero, I think we as Americans have every right to say, “No you’re not going to do that.”

When host Chris Wallace asked if Cheney would support the mosque if Abdul Rauf had none of these alleged terror connections, she still wouldn’t concede. “It would depend,” Cheney said. Watch it (the segment starts at 3:20):

Of course, Kristol and Cheney did not offer any specifics on Abdul Rauf’s alleged terror connections. After inquiries from ThinkProgress, Keep America Safe would not provide any evidence on the record and the Weekly Standard did not respond. The Standard’s Steven Schwartz tried to connect Abdul Rauf to terrorism, but as the New America Foundation’s Robert Wright noted, he wasn’t very successful:

Schwartz’s piece goes on and on, weaving webs of association so engrossing that you have to keep reminding yourself that they have nothing to do with Rauf. At one point Schwartz spends several paragraphs damning someone whose connection to Park51 seems to consist of having spoken favorably about it.

While the project has received considerable support from New York state and city politicians, it has also been praised by local religious leaders, Jewish and Christian. And if Abdul Rauf is so anti-American as Cheney and Kristol say, why would the FBI praise his cooperation with the agency after 9/11? “We’ve had positive interactions with him in the past,” an agency spokesperson said.

So, by denying religious rights to Abdul Rauf simply because she disagrees him, isn’t Cheney espousing one of the central tenants of the religious extremism she claims to abhor?

Read more about the right-wing’s intolerance to the New York City mosque in today’s Progress Report.

HUFFINGTON: Right here, we have the poster child of Bush-Cheney crony capitalism. Halliburton involved in this, and we haven’t said about that. They after all were responsible for cementing the well. Here’s Halliburton, after it defrauded the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars –

CHENEY: Arianna, I don’t know what planet you live on, but that’s not –

HUFFINGTON: — it’s involved again. I’m living on this planet. … Halliburton was involved in this. How can you say it is not?

TAPPER: Well, Halliburton was cementing the pipe.

HUFFINGTON: How can you say Halliburton has no relationship?

CHENEY: Her assertion that Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government –

HUFFINGTON: It did. It did.

CHENEY: It was Bush-Cheney cronyism is the left talking point –

HUFFINGTON: It was — hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq.

CHENEY: Arianna, is absolutely not true. It is absolutely not true.

Watch it:

First of all, Halliburton was involved in the current oil spill, as both Huffington and host Jake Tapper pointed out. From the Wall Street Journal:

An oil-drilling procedure called cementing is coming under scrutiny as a possible cause of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that has led to one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history, drilling experts said Thursday. [...]

The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week. The disaster, which killed 11, has left a gusher of oil streaming into the Gulf from a mile under the surface. … According to Transocean Ltd., the operator of the drilling rig, Halliburton had finished cementing the 18,000-foot well shortly before the explosion.

Natalie Roshto, whose husband died after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, has filed a lawsuit against BP and oil rig owner Transocean for violating “numerous statutes and regulations.” The suit also names Halliburton, claiming that prior to the disaster, it was “engaged in cementing operations of the well and well cap and, upon information and belief, improperly and negligently performed these duties, which was a cause of the explosion.” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) has also sent a letter to Halliburton seeking more details about its role. (Josh Dorner and Rebecca Lefton of CAPAF have more here and here on Cheney’s ties to this disaster.)

Second of all, Halliburton became notorious for its malfeasance in Iraq. It allegedly tried to cover up the gang rape of one of its contractors, knowingly exposed U.S. troops to deadly toxins, and ignored warnings of unsafe electrical wiring that led to the death of U.S. soldiers. In 2007, federal auditors told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that the government had wasted $10 billion on “overpriced contracts or undocumented costs.” Of that amount, $2.7 billion was charged by Halliburton.

Transcript:

HUFFINGTON: The truth is that right now we have precisely the regulatory system that the Bush-Cheney administration wanted — full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbyists filling the very agencies they’re supposed to be overseeing –

WILL: So it’s Bush’s fault.

HUFFINGTON: — the industry.

WILL: Just clear this up.

HUFFINGTON: It is absolutely 1000 percent Bush-Cheney’s fault, plus the fact that the Obama administration has not really done enough fast enough to change what’s happening at the MMS agency, at all sorts of other agencies. Not just when it comes to the energy problems, when it comes to Wall Street — all over, we are seeing the complete success of the kind of regulatory system that Bush-Cheney wanted. And we’re seeing this is the inevitable result of what they wanted.

CHENEY: You know, it’s truly amazing. I mean I actually heard that George Bush was responsible for the breakup of Tipper and Al Gore’s marriage too. I mean it’s incredible the extent to which people are now trying to shift blame. And frankly –

MOULITSAS: Did you fact check that?

TAPPER: We’ll get that fact.

CHENEY: I heard it. I don’t know. I think it was on the DailyKos. But at any rate, I think that, you know we got to look at what’s happening going forward, and you’ve got to look at the facts. I mean, the left is going to try — you guys –

HUFFINGTON: This has nothing to do with the left.

CHENEY: — have for years been demonizing Bush and Cheney, and I’m sure you will continue to demonize them for years going forward, but we have got now a catastrophe on the Gulf Coast, a catastrophe that happened on this administration’s watch which this administration is failing to clean up and be responsive and lead, frankly. And it is a problem we’re seeing with this president across the board. A president with no leadership experience.

HUFFINGTON: Right here, we have the poster child of Bush-Cheney crony capitalism. Halliburton involved in this, and we haven’t said about that. They after all were responsible for cementing the well. Here’s Halliburton, after it defrauded the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars –

CHENEY: Arianna, I don’t know what planet you live on, but that’s not –

HUFFINGTON: — it’s involved again. I’m living on this planet. You’re living in a planet that is –

CHENEY: — it’s — Arianna, what you’re saying –

HUFFINGTON: — continuing –

CHENEY: — has no relationship to –

HUFFINGTON: It is completely –

CHENEY: No relationship to the effects –

HUFFINGTON: — Halliburton was involved in this. How can you say it is not?

TAPPER: Well, Halliburton was cementing the pipe.

HUFFINGTON: How can you say Halliburton has no relationship?

CHENEY: Her assertion that Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government –

HUFFINGTON: It did. It did.

CHENEY: It was Bush-Cheney cronyism is the left talking point –

HUFFINGTON: It was — hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq.

CHENEY: Arianna, is absolutely not true. It is absolutely not true.

HUFFINGTON: OK, I’m so glad Politifact is going to be checking this. I’m so glad.

CHENEY: Good.

CHENEY: When you look at the question over whether the US tax payer ought to be contributing to bailing out Greece, I think you also got to say wait a second at the same time that we are looking to put $7 billion to bail out Greece… we’ve got the same types of policies being put in place here in the United States that frankly are much more likely to lead us down the path that we see Greece on.

Mara Liasson pushed back, noting that the notion that the U.S. was bailing out Greece was nothing more than a great conservative “talking point.” Watch it:

The U.S. — along with many other countries– is a contributor to the International Monetary Fund, which serves as a lender of last resort to countries in crisis in order to prevent these crises from spreading worldwide. By Cheney’s standard every Administration in the last 60 years since the IMF was created, including the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations, have “bailed out” countries.

Cheney’s suggestion that the United States adopt the kind of “austerity” measures being enacted in Greece, moreover, would lead to absolute economic catastrophe. Greece is expected to experience massive economic contraction and if the U.S. were to follow that approach, it would fall back into a deep recession.

Still, Cheney contends that America’s deficits will lead to a Greek-like tragedy. But as Marshal Auerback notes, the problem isn’t Greece’s debt per say but its inability to service that debt, because it both doesn’t control its currency (the Euro) and because its economy is contracting. The United States is in no danger of defaulting — the American economy is growing and due to fears over the Euro, investors are boosting the value of the dollar.

In fact, what the crisis has actually shown is the failure of conservative approaches to economic crises. Contrary to most conceptions, Germany’s leadership has long adopted a conservative approach to the crisis, resisting economic stimulus or providing economic support to other European countries. As a result, the crisis has gotten worse and now threatens to spread to other Southern European countries, putting the Euro currency and the entire global economy at risk. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has finally awoken to the danger and has now belatedly agreed to a massive bailout for Greece – one that is considerably larger than what would have been needed if she acted sooner.

But conservatives in America are still holding on to their failed economic dogma. As Dave Weigel notes, “Greece is the new France” meaning that “Greece is now the nation whose name Republicans invoke to make the case against Democratic policies.”

CHENEY: When the administration captures a terrorist and their first instinct is to inform him that he’s got the right to remain silent, that is exactly the wrong way to win this war. When we capture a terrorist, our first instinct has got to be: How do we understand the networks to which this terrorist is connected? How do we understand where he was trained? How do we understand who the leadership is? The administration is approaching this, and again this morning you had John Brennan saying, “Well, this was one-off because he drove the truck alone.” That doesn’t even make sense, it’s inexplicable. But if you aren’t willing to acknowledge that you’re facing a committed network of terrorists as your enemies, and that it’s radical jihadist Islam, then your response to that is gonna be, by definition, insufficient time and time again.

Watch it:

In reality, Faisal Shahzad was questioned before being Mirandized. When Faisal Shahzad was apprehended 53 hours after having parked his vehicle in Times Square, the arresting agents invoked the “security exception” in order to immediately question Shahzad about imminent threats before informing him of his right to remain silent — a right he is legally entitled to as an American citizen.

Asked on Friday whether Mirandizing Shahzad had impeded the ongoing investigation, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “No, it did not. Reading suspects their Miranda warnings has not deterred them from speaking to investigators, and Mr. Shahzad is, in fact, continuing to cooperate with us.” But, in Liz Cheney’s world, this represents a failure.

Today, Thiessen is up with another defense of the Cheney-led attacks, writing on the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog that defenders of the Justice Department lawyers are wrong to invoke John Adams’ defense of British soldiers after the Boston massacre:

Defenders of the habeas lawyers representing al-Qaeda terrorists have invoked the iconic name of John Adams to justify their actions, claiming these lawyers are only doing the same thing Adams did when he defended British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. The analogy is clever, but wholly inaccurate.

For starters, Adams was a British subject at the time he took up their representation. The Declaration of Independence had not yet been signed, and there was no United States of America. The British soldiers were Adams’ fellow countrymen — not foreign enemies of the state at war with his country.

Thiessen’s argument that Adams was defending “fellow countrymen” and “not foreign enemies” is clever, but it’s undermined by the fact that some of the lawyers Thiessen and the ad impugn did work on behalf of American citizens. In a National Review blog post promoting his PostPartisan column, Thiessen directly attacks a lawyer who advocated on behalf of a detained American citizen:

Eric Holder vs. John Adams [Marc Thiessen]

I have a piece up for the Washington Post explaining why the al-Qaeda lawyers are wrong to wrap themselves in the mantle of John Adams. Thanks to the spade work of Bill Burck and Dana Perino, we now know why Holder was stonewalling on the identities of the “Al Qaeda 7” — he was one of them! If Holder and co. are simply carrying on the traditions of John Adams, why were they hiding their roles in seeking the release of enemy combatants? If they are proud of their work, why don’t they stand up and say so?

Yesterday, Perino and Burck published an article on National Review Online detailing how Holder contributed to, but neglected to tell the Senate about, an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was held as an enemy combatant. Another one of the lawyers smeared by the ad, Joseph Guerra, now Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General, worked on a brief urging that the Supreme Court hear Padilla’s case. Another DoJ lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Tony West, worked on the case of “American Taliban” Johh Walker Lindh, an American citizen.

The discrepancy between Thiessen’s PostPartisan argument and the facts is indicative of his arguments in general. In discussing another one of Thiessen’s inconsistent arguments, Time’s Michael Scherer — who considers Thiessen’s vocal crusade to defend the Bush administration’s torture policies “a good thing” — remarked that he was “disappointed with the quality of Thiessen’s arguments, which seem to be designed more for cable news soundbites than for serious discussion.”

“I’ve been a military lawyer for almost 30 years, I represented people as a defense attorney in the military that were charged with some pretty horrific acts, and I gave them my all,” said Graham. “This system of justice that we’re so proud of in America requires the unpopular to have an advocate and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer.”

– DJ Carella

But in an interview today on the Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio show, Cheney denied that the ad questioned “anybody’s loyalty”:

HOLMES: Liz, good morning. So you released a fairly provocative ad, I have to say. And you ask the question “whose values” [does] Eric Holder share? In your view, whose values does he share?

CHENEY: Well, what the ad does — and actually it doesn’t question anybody’s loyalty. What the ad does is it says that there are nine lawyers in the Justice Department who used to represent al Qaeda terrorists and the Attorney General will only tell us who two of them are and we want the American people to have the right to know who the others are.

Guest host Amy Holmes continued to press Cheney on the point, repeating her question. “But your ad does raise the question ‘whose values’ does Eric Holder share. Who would you say?” Cheney dodged the question, stating that she thinks Holder “believes that you can defeat terror, you can win this war we’re engaged in by treating terrorism like law enforcement.” Listen here:

Cheney is simply lying. Not only does the ad suggest that the lawyers might “share” the “values” of al Qaeda, but it also flashes an image of a headline from the far right Investor’s Business Daily asking if the Justice Department was the “Department of Jihad?” “Just whose side are they on?” asked the editorial.

When Politico’s Smith first reported on the ad, Keep America Safe spokesman Michael Goldfarb gave him a quote that essentially accused the lawyers of treason, saying that they “did far more than represent criminals.” “They have propagandized on behalf of our enemies, engaging in a worldwide smear campaign against the CIA, the U.S. military and the United States itself while we are at war,” said Goldfarb. On Tuesday, Keep America Safe released a fundraising letter in Cheney’s name that used the exact same language:

Former Bush administration officials have pushed back against the ad. “While it’s legitimate for the public to inquire about the past work of DOJ political appointees, we need to recognize that our judicial system cannot function without pro bono counsel, and it doesn’t make a lawyer less patriotic just because he or she has represented a criminal or terrorist suspect,” former U.S. attorney and homeland security adviser Kenneth Wainstein told the Washington Post. “It’s beyond a cheap shot to suggest that a lawyer is an al-Qaeda sympathizer because he advocates a detainee’s position in the Supreme Court,” said former Bush White House lawyer Reginald Brown.

For more on Cheney’s smearing of the Justice Department lawyers, read today’s Progress Report.

Upon finding out that McCain had tapped Palin as his running mate, Vice President Dick Cheney called it a “reckless choice,” believing the Alaska governor was unprepared for high office.

On ABC’s This Week today, host George Stephanopoulos asked Liz Cheney if it was “true” that her father believed that. “No,” replied Cheney. “It’s not accurate.” Watch it:

Liz Cheney’s neoconservative political attack organization, Keep America Safe, is out with a new ad titled “100 hours.” Replete with images of Obama golfing, the ad — which imitates the TV show 24 — ends with the question, “How long did it take you to realize the system failed?”:

Of course, while Obama wasn’t speaking publicly about the terrorist incident, he was directing an immediate federal response.

Moreover, as Huffington Post’s Sam Stein documented, President Bush didn’t utter a single word about shoe bomber Richard Reid’s terrorist attack for six days, whereupon he simply said that he was “grateful for the flight attendant’s response, as I’m sure the passengers on that airplane.”

On ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos confronted Cheney about her hypocritical attack. “As many Democrats and others have pointed out, President Bush waited I think six days before doing much about Richard Reid, the shoe bomber,” he noted. Cheney evaded the question entirely, pretending not to hear it. “The point of that ad,” she said, “was this notion that you cannot win a war if you’re treating it as sort of an inconvenient sidelight.” Watch it:

When she took the stage, Hutchison noted a Sunday cable show in which daughter Liz Cheney suggested her father might be a good presidential candidate in four years.

“I wasn’t sure when I saw Liz Cheney on TV Sunday, I thought this might be the start of Cheney 2012,” Hutchison said.

A member of the crowd shouted, “We need you, Dick.”

Cheney shook his head.

“No chance,” he said.

Watch it (Via Jason Embry):

LIZ CHENEY: You could also look at the comparison and think, Cheney 2012.

WALLACE: Really?! How far do you want to go with that?

KRISTOL: Let Liz make news. Cheney/Palin.

WALLACE: Or Palin/Cheney — don’t be sexist.

Watch it:

Liz Cheney and fellow Fox co-panelist Bill Kristol sit together on the board of Keep America Safe, an ostensibly partisan organization created for the purpose of crafting national security attack ads on Democrats. Fox, of course, never disclosed Cheney and Kristol’s common affiliation.