Liz Cheney Is Even More Bonkers Than We Suspected

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

Liz Cheney’s op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal is an important and alarming document. She is not a marginal figure — she served as deputy assistant secretary of State for near eastern affairs in the Bush administration. More important, she is a very close ally of her father's and the two have exhibited every sign of sharing a worldview in essentially every particular, which suggests that something very much like her brain held, depending on your point of view, either the second most powerful or the most powerful job in American politics for eight years. And she (and thus, by extension, her father) is obviously stark raving mad.

Even after four years of bug-eyed right-wing paranoia, Cheney’s op-ed stands out for its utter dearth of the slightest whiff of perspective or factual grounding. President Obama, she tells us, “is the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office.” He has “launched a war on Americans' Second Amendment rights.” He does not want the economy to grow. (“He believes in greater redistribution of a much smaller pie.”) Obama “seems unaware that the free-enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system devised by man” — which is odd, because Obama is always saying things like “business, and not government, will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift people into the middle class and keep them there.” The best approximations of America’s future under Obama are tiny European nations that lack control of their own currency. (“If you're unsure of what this America would look like, Google ‘Cyprus’ or ‘Greece.’”)

One might charitably attribute Cheney’s crazed rants on domestic policy to her attempting to opine on matters outside her field of expertise. Yet her litany of foreign-policy accusations is actually even more unhinged. Obama, she argues, has not only weakened America, he wants to weaken America’s world standing in the same way he wants to shrink its economy (“there is no longer a question of whether this was his intent”). He wants to “pre-emptively disarm the United States.”

(More here.)