It was about eight years ago that Liz Cheney took her first major leadership role, heading up a group within the State Department called the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group. That lasted about a year, and ended on an unpleasant note.
The Bush administration has dismantled a special committee that was established last year to coordinate aggressive actions against Iran and Syria, according to State Department officials. […]The group had become the focus for administration critics who feared that it was plotting covert actions that could escalate into a military conflict with Iran or Syria. The air of secrecy surrounding the group when it was established in March 2006, coupled with the fact that it was modeled after a similar special committee on Iraq, contributed to those suspicions.
Later, Liz Cheney took on a different leadership role, heading up an odd outfit called Keep America Safe. That also didn’t turn out especially well.
A Liz Cheney co-founded group promoting neoconservative foreign and counterterrorism policy has been quietly scrubbed from the Internet with its last discernible web presence [in the summer of 2013].
With Keep America Safe’s failures behind, Liz Cheney then headed a very different kind of operation: she launched a U.S. Senate campaign in Wyoming. It became one of the cycle’s biggest fiascoes.
But don’t worry about Liz Cheney, who’s now going to take the lead as the head of yet another political operation.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Senate candidate Liz Cheney, are launching a “grassroots organization that will advocate for a restoration of American strength and power,” according to a release about their new organization, The Washington Post reports.The Cheneys posted a video to YouTube about The Alliance for a Strong America, a 501(c)(4) grass-roots organization, on Tuesday. The video’s description hits “the dangerous policies of the Obama Administration” and promises to keep “policies necessary to protect the nation” in the spotlight.
Why does the nation need another far-right group to complain about the president? I have no idea. Why does Liz Cheney think this operation will turn out any differently from the other ventures she’s headed? No one knows.
But there are a few amusing angles to this new Alliance for a Strong America operation, which Rachel will be talking about on tonight’s show. Tune in.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."