That’s why the forum hosted Henry Kissinger, this big idea’s mascot. And that’s why the forum ended with an interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a memoir to promote. Cheney was joined onstage by his daughter and co-author, Liz Cheney, who is devoting herself to whitewashing her father’s legacy of torture and death and shooting old men in the face.

They were technically being “interviewed” by a third party — a journalist! — but for some reason most of the question-asking was actually done by … Liz.

“Were you really secretly running things?” Liz Cheney asked.

“No,” her father said.

As proof, he cited the fact that President Bush once had Cheney’s dog banned from a section of Camp David.

This gentle interrogation seems to have struck certain high-profile Atlantic contributors as a bit silly but on the other hand it would be much harder to get big names to attend these things if they were worried someone might call them out for being a war criminal. (Hot tip for the International Criminal Court: Try sending out invitations for a sham “Ideas Festival”?)

The forum also hosted former Pakistan leader Pervez Musharraf, an actual former dictator. (But one of the “good ones”!)

This is what she came up with:

Yesterday, President Obama said the Israeli action to stop the flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip was “tragic.” What is truly tragic is that President Obama is perpetuating Israel’s enemies’ version of events. The Israeli government has imposed a blockade around Gaza because Hamas remains committed to Israel’s destruction…

President Obama is contributing to the isolation of Israel, and sending a clear signal to the Turkish-Syrian-Iranian axis that their methods for ostracizing Israel will succeed, and will be met by no resistance from America.

There is no middle ground here. Either the United States stands with the people of Israel in the war against radical Islamic terrorism or we are providing encouragement to Israel’s enemies — and our own. Keep America Safe calls on President Obama to reverse his present course and support the state of Israel immediately and unequivocally.

It’s hardly worth bothering to correct the record, but the president just said that it was “tragic” that people, including a 19-year-old American citizen, died. I guess Liz’s position is that the loss of life was necessary.

In fairness, she did also say conservatives need to applaud Obama when he does the right thing. But she made it clear that “doing the right thing” basically entails “doing whatever the Bush administration would be doing if it were still in charge.”

One line in Cheney’s speech, though it didn’t get much of a reaction from the audience, seemed like a bit more than a throwaway. “It will fall to our next president, whenever he — or she — takes office on Jan. 20, 2013,” Cheney said, to lead the nation back to the right path. With Sarah Palin speaking here on Friday, was Cheney trying to encourage her to run in 2012?

Even Starr is outraged by Cheney’s despicable attack on Justice Department lawyers who’ve defended terror suspects in their past. She’s labeled the group “the al Qaida seven,” and suggested they should be ineligible for Justice Department work.

By contrast Starr called such work “in the finest traditions of the country.” He noted that American founder and president John Adams “represented the British redcoats who were accused of the Boston Massacre – and he successfully defended seven of the British troops who were accused of these crimes.” Starr worked in Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” remembering Finch told his kids “‘I’ve got to do this as a matter of conscience,’ and it was the conscience of a great profession… One needs to be courageous at times and stand up to power.”

Starr isn’t the only conservative who signed the letter. Former Solicitor General (and counsel to the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project) Ted Ols0n did too. Maybe most remarkable to me, since I’ve debated him, is the signature of torture-defender David Rivkin. If Cheney’s gone too far for Rivkin, that’s pretty far indeed.

I’m amused by the fact that Cheney’s biggest defender is Wrong-way Bill Kristol, who’s almost always wrong about almost everything. He predicted some conservative lawyers would sign the letter of protest, sneering “The legal fraternity doesn’t like criticism of lawyers.”

Starr’s response? “I love Bill Kristol, I view him as a friend. But this is not consistent with the great traditions of our country and certainly of our profession…very fine traditions. [The condemned lawyers] deserve commendation. They do not deserve criticism at all. This was very unwise.”

I love that it’s Cheney and Kristol, two of the nation’s top beneficiaries of affirmative action for conservative white people (which is far more widespread than any preferences for minorities), who are still insisting their shameful attacks are reasonable. Like naughty spoiled children, they’re happy their high jinks are rattling their elders. Kewl!

But I don’t think this helps Liz Cheney in her reported quest to redeem her father’s legacy by running for Senate in Wyoming or Virginia. For all these conservative lawyers to immediately smack her down suggests she’s a) dead wrong and b) not well respected. This is a public humiliation for Cheney, and on a lesser scale, for Kristol. It shows they don’t understand “the finest traditions of our country.”

Honestly, both of them are starting to look like the washed-out later generation of once-relevant elite families. We all know how that happens. I could be wrong, because being mean and conscience-free counts for a lot in politics today. But this won’t be the last time Cheney is rebuked.

But there’s a catch: The effort to rehabilitate and revive Cheney-style politics doesn’t revolve around the man himself. Instead, his daughter Liz has taken up the mantle. Running a now-infamous group called Keep America Safe, she’s vaulted herself  to prominence.

Keep America Safe has been in the news recently for an ad it produced, in which it labeled seven lawyers representing Guantánamo prisoners the “al Qaida seven.” This provoked outrage from just about everyone who’s not a Cheney family member or close family friend. Over the weekend, a statement circulated criticizing the group and calling the video “shameful.” Signatories include a number of moderate and conservative figures, and a number of past Cheney allies and former members of the Bush administration.

Cheney consigliere Bill Kristol is firing back the best way he knows. In his magazine, the Weekly Standard, Kristol yesterday went after his new critics as “shrinking violets” who are misrepresenting the issue. Call it a hunch, but I suspect the scales of history won’t be tipped by this.

On the other hand, Liz Cheney seems to be planning something a little more aggressive. As rumor has it, at the urging of friends, family and GOP operatives, she’s thinking of a run for Senate or Congress, either from where she lives in Virginia or the Cheney ancestral homeland of Wyoming. According to longtime Cheney friend former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., Liz was especially hurt by what she saw as her father’s mistreatment at the hands of the press and even other Republicans.

Simultaneously, however, since as early as 2000 she’s been hearing that she’s a potential candidate, or even a potential president. Her new group seems like a clear dry run for her higher ambitions. “I was excited about Palin; I’m more excited about Liz,” enthuses Michael Goldfarb, an operative with the group and a former Weekly Standard blogger. And, although her purpose in running would clearly be to resurrect her father’s legacy and agenda, Cheney backer Elliott Abrams warns liberals against identifying Liz with Dick. “If you have a woman candidate and what you’re saying is, ‘Don’t pay any attention to what she’s saying, just pay attention to her father,’ it’s not going to be very long before people say, ‘What kind of crap is that? This is sexism.’” 

You really have to love a political effort that’s calling critics “shrinking violets” out of one side of its mouth and accusing them of sexism out of the other. (Also, Cheney’s own sister Mary says, “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any daylight at all between Liz’s and my father’s views.”)

Of course, isn’t clear yet exactly when or where Cheney is going to take the leap. But it looks like she will, and that her ambitions aren’t exactly small. If this is how the battle over the legacy of the Bush administration will be fought, then liberals could hardly have wished for a better opponent. Liz Cheney will give her father and his allies the crudest representation they could possibly find. She’s shown a willingness to attack the president with any weapon she can get her hands on: his birth certificate, pictures of Osama bin Laden, claims that he’s kowtowing (literally) to foreign leaders.

So, not really a fresh break from the past yet. Moreover, her group, Keep America Safe, is bankrolled by a Florida strip-mall developer. If you wanted to put a face on the over-building that characterized the worst of the Sun Belt’s excess during the real estate bubble, you could do worse than to point to Mel Sembler. The developer, GOP fundraiser and former ambassador to Italy has urged Cheney to run for office, and says he’s “as supportive as (his) budget will allow.” Sembler also founded, with his wife, a chain of drug rehabilitation clinics called Straight, Inc., which ultimately folded under charges of abuse. As Reason magazine puts it, “At all of Straight’s facilities, state investigators and/or civil lawsuits documented scores of abuses including teens being beaten, deprived of food and sleep for days, restrained by fellow youth for hours, bound, sexually humiliated, abused and spat upon.”

So there you have the rough outlines of a Cheney revival, coming into view: an agenda so discredited that advocacy for it consists mainly of crude and completely unsubstantiated attacks on opponents, funded by a Florida real estate magnate whose primary achievement appears to be bringing Abu Ghraib to American teenagers. It sounds to me like we should start clearing a couple places on Mount Rushmore for the two Cheneys already.