Good news for everyone. Hawks get a well funded, well connected nonprofit to put out the message — and there’s plenty of reason to think the public will be receptive — and doves get a new Cheney/Kristol collaboration they can screech at. If PNAC had a PAC…
Keep America Safe will focus on issues like troop levels, missile defense, detainees, and interrogation, according to Liz Cheney, who is heading the group along with Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Debra Burlingame, the hawkish sister of an American Airlines pilot killed in the September 11 attacks…
“The Left has dozens of organizations and tens of millions of dollars dedicated to undercutting the war on terror,” said Kristol, a seasoned partisan warrior. “The good guys need some help too.”
The group’s mechanics are largely a product of former campaign aides to Senator John McCain: Michael Goldfarb, now a Weekly Standard blogger, is an adviser to the group; its executive director is McCain war room chief Aaron Harison, and the video was produced by Justin Germany, the McCain aide who produced a campaign video titled, “The One,” which mocked Obama as a messianic figure.
LC denies that starting the group has anything to do with her political ambitions, but given that this will establish her as even more of a go-to spokesman for hawks on cable news than she already is, that’s hard to take seriously. Here’s the website; the section on CIA interrogations under “Resources” is, not surprisingly, the most worthwhile part. And here’s the new video, which is slickly produced but needlessly melodramatic per the music. The use of multiple clips from Fox News stands out too. Like it or not, FNC is a conservative bugaboo for at least some of the centrists Cheney’s trying to lure into the hawkish camp; if it wasn’t, Anita Dunn wouldn’t be whining about it daily. Keep the partisan signposts out of the spots going forward, please.
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