Source: Dallas Morning News
Liz Cheney slammed President Barack Obama on several fronts today – and along the way offered a passionate defense of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Focusing on the elder Cheney's hallmark issue of national security, Liz Cheney condemned Obama's current strategies and challenged criticism of her father's often controversial work.
"Obama began to reverse vital national security policies, began to release classified information and then he started threatening to prosecute and investigate the men and women who kept us safe after 9/11," she said.
"Dick Cheney is not the kind of man to stay silent in the face of those kinds of attacks."
Liz Cheney – a former State Department official in her own right – spoke before a partisan conservative crowd at a luncheon at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas. The event was sponsored by the National Center for Policy Analysis.
She hammered home several popular Republican themes.
There was, however, at least one controversial issue on which she agreed with Obama and most Democrats: repealing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for gays in the military.
Cheney – whose sister, Mary, is openly gay – pointed out that several top military officials support the repeal and that a recent Pentagon report showed such action wouldn't affect the military's readiness or defense capabilities.
"It's time," she said in an interview after the event.
In her speech, she frequently channeled her father's knack for bluntness. (Just last month, the elder Cheney couldn't help but tweak Obama at the groundbreaking ceremony for the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University.)
She blamed the Obama administration, at least in part, for this week's massive leak of classified diplomatic cables.
She predicted that a Republican would win the White House in 2012, although she wouldn't pick a candidate.
And she scoffed at Democrats' frequent complaint that Republicans have spent Obama's entire term obstructing legislation.
"Obama's problem was not that he failed to get things done," she said. "His problem was – and remains – that the American people are deeply fearful about the things he did accomplish."
A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee declined to comment on Cheney's speech.