Since when has anyone named Cheney felt obligated to uphold the Constitution? Set aside for a moment whether or not you believe Trump is a threat to constitutional order or anything else.

Let’s remember where Cheney has been a threat to the rule of law and our constitutional republic…

But if the War on Terror her father waged and Obama continued to oversee was also a war on the Constitution, Mrs. Cheney was all in on that battle too.

“The same congresswoman who now warns that former President Donald Trump threatens the ‘foundations of our constitutional republic’ has not cared about the most basic precepts of the U.S. Constitution for most of her career.”@jackhunter74 with the ?:https://t.co/kRDwyrjCcz

— Brad Polumbo ?? ?‍? (@brad_polumbo) November 16, 2021

A good example was when Cheney was promoting and defending CIA operative Gina Haspel in 2018, Trump’s pick to head that agency. Cheney said Haspel “spent her career defending the American people” and her critics were simply “defending terrorists.”

Haspel had a documented role in waterboarding abroad and other “enhanced interrogation tactics,” including covering up America’s role in carrying out these atrocities.

Constitutional liberties and protections, and the United States’ moral complicity in engaging in this illegal behavior, mattered little to Cheney at the time.

Read the entire column.

The post Liz Cheney needs to stop citing the Constitution – she’s trampled it her entire career appeared first on Liberty Tree.

From my latest column at Responsible Statecraft, “Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol and their friends may wag their fingers today at Trump and his supporters’ red meat rhetoric, but the anti-Islamic speech and conspiracy theories that plagued the Republican base throughout the aughts were never denounced by the neoconservative establishment at the time.

Such behavior was more often encouraged or at least ignored because it helped the war cause. Don’t forget Dick Cheney, before he was denouncing Trump’s Muslim ban when it was politically convenient, was telling fellow Republicans that Obama was supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. His daughter Liz, before she was denouncing MAGA conspiratorialists, was on ‘Larry King’ defending the so called ‘Birthers’ who didn’t believe Obama was born in this country:

‘I think the Democrats have got more crazies than the Republicans do,’ Cheney said at the time. ‘But setting that aside, one of the reasons you see people so concerned about this, I think this issue is, people are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas …’

Kristol carried himself as being above the anti-Muslim fray, but rarely criticized the rampant, xenophobic Bush-era hate in the way that he goes after Trump today on a regular basis. Joseph Leone at Harvard’s Progressive Policy Review noted of Kristol in February, ‘The war, and the jingoistic propaganda Kristol peddled to support it, have also contributed to the rise in Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence within the United States and globally. Although Kristol now opposes Donald Trump, the former president’s Muslim ban and frequent incitement of violence against Muslims are the product of the war drums Kristol played for years.”

Read the entire column.

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Yahoo News reported Thursday, “Former President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will support a Wyoming attorney’s bid to unseat GOP Rep. Liz Cheney.”

“In a statement, Trump endorsed Harriet Hageman, who stepped down from her role representing Wyoming on the Republican National Committee in advance of the announcement.”

Some who disagree Trump’s fraudulent 2020 election claims do not like that the former president actively works against Cheney now, who has criticized Trump for those claims.

Whatever you think of Trump trying to take down an adversary within his own party for whatever reason, we know Liz Cheney has zero problem trying to take down adversaries within her own party for any reason.

Just ask Rep. Thomas Massie.

In April 2020 Rep. Thomas Massie enraged all of Washington when he attempted to force a roll-call vote on the massive $2 trillion coronavirus relief package.

What a #masshole

Corrupt coronavirus bailout results prove Thomas Massie was right all along https://t.co/DsxfSgk6gU

— Being Libertarian (@beinlibertarian) April 17, 2020

I wrote at the Washington Examiner at the time, “The libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican’s move would have required members of Congress, including those who are elderly and among the most threatened by the novel coronavirus, to return to Washington. Massie was attacked and called a ‘Grandstander,’ ‘Un-American,’ and even a ‘Masshole’ by many high-ranking officials.”

President Trump called for Massie to be thrown out of the GOP. So did Liz Cheney, who immediately backed Massie’s primary challenger (yet later withdrew her support).

Never mind that Massie was proven right about the spending package just three weeks later.

“As many citizens received their stimulus payments this week, many also noticed that aspects of this aid looked rotten,” I wrote. “For starters, while mom-and-pop restaurants battled to get their pieces of the $350 billion ‘Payback Protection Program,’ large chain restaurants got them first .

While small businesses of all types, from salons to bars to auto shops, waited for relief, some hedge funds had applied ahead of them for a loan.” I noted. “So many big businesses and others applied that by Thursday, the money ran out.”

“Many little guys are still desperately waiting,” I finished. “Still, the rich got theirs.”

Massie had argued that in Washington’s haste to pass that bill, the little guy might get hurt because no one was paying attention to where the money would actually go. It was Massie practicing basic fiscal conservatism.

Does anyone think Cheney cared about that?

No, like her father, Liz Cheney is a thorough neoconservative whose primary reason for being in Washington is make sure the U.S. remains on a permanent war footing. The libertarian-leaning Massie believes we should not be fighting unnecessary wars or engaging in nation building.

When Trump wanted Massie ousted from the Republican Party, Cheney did not hesitate one second to stand alongside Trump and attempt to get rid of Massie using the president’s popularity.

Now the dynamics have flip-flopped and Cheney finds herself on the bad side of Trump. Some see Trump trying to take down Cheney as unfair.

When the script was flipped, Cheney used the same tactics against Thomas Massie. Without flinching. It was reflexive. She had an opportunity to stamp out an arch ideological enemy.

‘Fair’ had nothing to do with it.

The post That time Liz Cheney sided with Trump to take down Thomas Massie appeared first on Liberty Tree.

I would like to thank Rep. Adam Kinzinger for his service. This is about the only kind thing I can say about the Republican congressman as it relates to American foreign policy.

U.S. foreign policy has been a disaster for the last twenty years due to people who think like him. Kinzinger spent the weekend whining on social media about anyone who ever tried to end America’s longest war in Afghanistan, tweeting:

The withdrawal from #Afghanistan, pushed by @RandPaul negotiated by Pompeo, bragged about by Trump, and executed by Biden, guaranteed the “Forever War” that the terrorists declared against us, continues. That’s the real forever war.

— Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) August 22, 2021

While the Biden administration withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan in the worst possible way, the notion of having American soldiers another week in a country where they cannot or will not defend themselves after all this time is an insult to our military.

Kinzinger is being cute with his comments about “forever war” in his tweet, but it is what politicians of his ilk truly want: The U.S. to be on a permanent war footing indefinitely.

It was neoconservative Republicans during the George W. Bush administration that got America into this prolonged mess and Kinzinger’s intent is to carry on that disastrous foreign policy legacy.

When President Trump announced that the U.S. would finally be leaving Iraq in the near future, neoconservative Republicans like Kinzinger and Liz Cheney teamed up with Democrats to try to stop a withdrawal.

CATO’s Doug Bandow touched on those efforts in July 2020, writing, “Republicans also are taking the lead in the Democratic‐ controlled House to sacrifice American interests for foreign governments. For instance, Rep. Liz Cheney…backed a Democratic proposal to limit further withdrawals from Afghanistan, where Americans have been engaged in a nearly 20‐ year nation‐ building mission.”

“The measure passed by a 45 to 11 vote: members of both countries seem determined to keep Americans forever fighting in Central Asia,” Bandow noted. “They care more for the corrupt, incompetent regime in Kabul than America service members and taxpayers. In contrast, the president, despite his halting, inconsistent policy, better represents this nation’s interests.”

Bandow added, “For instance, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R‐ Ill) complained that Trump’s refusal to keep the U.S. forever entangled in another nation’s civil war, tragic but irrelevant to American security, was ‘weak.”

That line could have came straight from Dick Cheney’s lips. Former President Donald Trump’s aversion to war has always been at the heart of Kinzinger’s deranged Never Trumpism.

For years, an overwhelming majority of Americans have supported withdrawal from Afghanistan, as Kinzinger now tries to use Biden’s poor strategy to argue the U.S. should have never left. Again, he quite literally wants forever wars.

If it is a soldier’s job to do his or her duty, it is our job as citizens to question our government when it chooses to go to war. Kinzinger finds it reprehensible that any American would ever question a war or want to end one. The mere inquiry sends the congressman into conniptions.

For all his moralizing and posturing, Adam Kinzinger is part of the outdated and discredited Washington foreign policy consensus that kept the U.S. in Afghanistan for so long in the first place. He will never admit it, he will never learn a single lesson from our foreign policy mistakes, and her will gladly repeat those mistakes with any willing presidents or parties in the future.

Adam Kinzinger is part of what’s been wrong with U.S. foreign policy for many years.

Too many.

The post Adam Kinzinger is what’s wrong with American foreign policy appeared first on Liberty Tree.

If more people had listened to my father our war in Afghanistan would have been less tragic

By Sen. Rand Paul

After America was attacked by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, my father, Republican Congressman Ron Paul, voted for a U.S. strike on the Taliban in Afghanistan for harboring the 9/11 terrorists.

We were attacked, so we struck back. This is the reason we have and need a strong military: Actual national defense.

But our military is not meant for nation building. Not for policing the world. Not for imposing democracy in places that have never known it.

Not only are these bad ideas, but they aren’t the point of our military and they do nothing for our national defense.

Unfortunately, that was the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney neoconservative vision of perpetual U.S.-led wars around the globe. We know how that worked out in Iraq. Now we are learning how it ends in Afghanistan.

But this isn’t hindsight.

It was always doomed for failure, and some have said so for a very long time, and proved right time and time again through our recent foreign policy disasters.

It was my father, often alone in his party, who said for decades that the neocons’ endless wars would always come back to haunt us.

He did it early, and often. Over the weekend, a video compilation of warnings my Dad issued years ago went viral. Why was a 13-year-old video of a Congressman who retired in 2012 going viral?

Because he was right and more people should have listened to him, to me and to others who have been saying for a decade that this war needed to end.

Ron Paul asked questions like, “What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing Pakistan is directly related to the hatred directed toward us?” The scenes we see coming out of Afghanistan today are rage-filled. We honor and respect the brave men and women who served there for so long, but to ask them to stay another year there would be unconscionable. They did their duty.

“What if all wartime spending is paid for through the deceitful process of inflating and borrowing?” Dad asked. Considering that we were never able to afford the trillions spent in Afghanistan and we are now more concerned about inflation at home, Dad seemed ahead of his time.

My father asked, “What if we finally see that wartime conditions always undermine personal liberty?” Thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, we have a clearer picture of how our government abuses our constitutional liberties every day, often using post-9/11 jargon to justify it.

And again, on Afghanistan, my father had long urged to bring American troops home after the U.S. accomplished its original mission early on.

If the neoconservatives and others at the time had listened to Ron Paul back then, the tragedy in Afghanistan would not have been prolonged. Most importantly, it would have saved thousands of American lives and also money that we don’t actually have.

During the Tea Party-era ten years ago, I and other libertarian-leaning Republicans followed in my father’s footsteps and managed to change some formerly hawkish minds about war. When Donald Trump became president by blasting the Bush administration’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and condemning “endless wars,” Dad’s foreign policy message had come full circle within the GOP.

Yet, if the Republican Party had been more like Ron Paul than Dick Cheney throughout the aughts, it would have saved our country a lot of heartache. If Barack Obama had actually ended the wars he promised too, like Dad had long urged, we would have been better off.

Now the same people who still defend the Iraq War and who also wanted to stay in Afghanistan forever are some of the loudest voices criticizing the Taliban retaking control of that country. If after 20 years of preparing Afghanistan to govern itself, it immediately bends to extremists the moment we leave, what did hawks think we were going to accomplish over another decade—or ever? Was two decades not enough time?

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is sad but the blame should attach to the naive neocons who thought they could create a Jeffersonian democracy in a land clinging to the Stone Age, not to those who warned that it would inevitably end in a mess.

What’s clear today is that no one with the last name Cheney should even be speaking publicly right now. This origin of this debacle lies at their feet.

What’s even clearer, is that unfortunately the warnings of a Republican congressman from Texas years ago now feel more prescient than ever.

The post If more people had listened to my father our war in Afghanistan would have been less tragic appeared first on Liberty Tree.

At this point you just have to laugh at neocon Liz Cheney

Congresswoman Liz Cheney spent the weekend blaming both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump for the tragic chaos that continues to unfold in Afghanistan.

Cheney tweeted on Saturday:

The Trump/Biden calamity unfolding in Afghanistan began with the Trump administration negotiating with terrorists and pretending they were partners for peace, and is ending with American surrender as Biden abandons the country to our terrorist enemies. https://t.co/PQ1i5W6zZt

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) August 14, 2021

Trump “negotiating with terrorists” is obviously a shot at the former president meeting with Taliban leaders to agree to a plan for a conditions-based U.S. withdrawal. Biden, who did not attempt to meet with Taliban leaders, is now enduring the worst aftermath imaginable, post-withdrawal.

But never mind Trump or Biden. No matter who is president, the withdrawal was always going to be messy. Cheney and other like-minded “warmongering fools” knew this and it has been their strongest argument to stay forever. Cheney’s fellow forever war cheerleader, Sen. Lindsey Graham, was even calling for permanent American military bases in Afghanistan a decade ago.

There was never a good solution to ending the U.S.’s twenty year overstay in Afghanistan.

But if your last name is “Cheney,” you really should not be talking about it much, according to Twitter:

Have you not met George W. Bush or Dick Cheney?

— Rev. Dr. Chuck Currie (@RevChuckCurrie) August 15, 2021

If I were a Cheney I would sit this one out. Like, really out.

— Tzippy Shmilovitz ?‍ (@Tzipshmil) August 14, 2021

A little selective memory thing going on here?

How exactly did we get into this 20 years ago, and how did we think it would end?

— Khashoggi’s Ghost (@UROCKlive1) August 14, 2021

I see you’ve conveniently forgotten your dad’s huge role in how this nightmare began. Don’t worry. We haven’t.

— ForeverBlessed (@4evaBlessed23) August 14, 2021

It would never occur to Liz Cheney that if making any attempt to extract the US from a 20-year-long conflict is necessarily “calamitous,” then maybe the true “calamity” was the mission itself https://t.co/xY9pzMDtEg

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 15, 2021

I could go on, but it would almost literally mean reposting a significant percentage of Twitter over the weekend.

Given their long record of disastrous foreign policy decisions – including the current chaos in Afghanistan – Liz Cheney and the neoconservatives have forfeited their ability to have a credible opinion on American foreign policy ever again. Even if they haven’t figure this out yet.

The post At this point you just have to laugh at neocon Liz Cheney appeared first on Liberty Tree.

Never Trump Republicans biggest problem with Trump has always been his ‘America First’ foreign policy

What does every current Never Trump Republican member of Congress have in common besides being against Donald Trump? They are staunchly opposed to the former president’s ‘America First’ foreign policy.

For these Never Trumpers, this is not a bug, it’s a feature.

I am not saying that Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger were not legitimately horrified by the Capitol riot on January 6, 2020. I was too. It was a terrible and embarrassing day for the United States.

I am saying that if President Trump pursued the same foreign policy as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, you would not have heard as much criticism of Trump from Mrs. Cheney, Romney and Kinzinger. Even about January 6.

If Trump was a neoconservative “warmongering fool,” Liz Cheney would be his greatest supporter. Even after Trump claimed the election was stolen. Even after January 6.

— Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) May 12, 2021

Because before January 6, there was March 20, 2003 – the day the U.S. invaded Iraq. I don’t have to revisit every granular detail of that debacle to recall what most Americans and the world have long known: The U.S. intervention in Iraq was arguably the worst foreign policy mistake in our nation’s history. Trump rightly called the Iraq war “the worst mistake, the most costly mistake in the history of our country.”

Liz Cheney does not think the Iraq war was a mistake, and has long appeared to want to repeat that mistake in Iran. Mitt Romney has always adhered to Bush-era neoconservative foreign policy, has long defended the Iraq war, and like Cheney, wouldn’t mind doing it again in Iran. Similar to Cheney and Romney, Adam Kinzinger is not a fan of the U.S. pulling troops out of any combat zone at any time.

Not surprisingly, Kinzinger is opposed to the removal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Here is the congressman’s recent comments on that front, including bashing Trump for pursuing troop withdrawal, along with a follow up by advisor to Sen. Rand Paul, Doug Stafford:

No, warmongers like you who want to nation build and police the world forever own this. 15 years ago or 15 years from now, it would be the same result.

But much like your political judgement, your foreign policy judgement is god awful.

Enjoy your last few months in office. https://t.co/sC0lTKgu81

— Doug Stafford (@dougstafford) August 13, 2021

Romney predictably hates that U.S. troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan.

The Biden administration’s unwillingness to alter the Afghan withdrawal plan based on changing circumstances on the ground & the grave implications for US security interests is a tragedy & a cause for serious concern about how the administration will deal with global challenges. https://t.co/rM43t2uakH

— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) August 11, 2021

And of course for Liz Cheney, permanent war is a religion.

What’s happening in Afghanistan is catastrophic. US forces on the ground were working w/Afghan forces to prevent terrorists from establishing safe havens from which they can attack us again.

Withdrawing US forces is allowing terrorists & their allies to take over the country.

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) August 9, 2021

Stafford is right that in 15 years or even 100 years, the chaos happening in Afghanistan right now after troop withdrawal was always inevitable. The only alternative is the U.S. staying there forever.

Which Cheney, Romney and Kinzinger would have no problem with.

There is no time that Cheney, Romney or Kinzinger would advocate for avoiding war or ending a war that the hawkish Washington foreign policy establishment wanted to start or continue.

They will never say it forthright in public, but what the current Never Trump Republicans in Congress hate most is that Donald Trump significantly changed the conversation about what Republican foreign policy should be. Liz Cheney is part of a family that was able to almost exclusively define Republican foreign policy for a generation.

No more. ‘America First’ has now replaced the tired and disproven ‘If we don’t fight them over there, we’re going to have to fight them here.’ After all these war-weary years, fewer Americans than ever believe that anymore.

Fewer Republicans than ever believe it – and Never Trump perpetual war propagandists can’t stand it.

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