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.

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So Obama's response has been tepid and "neutral" (read: pretty much toothless). So Liz is just grabbing onto whatever she can to convince Americans that the president is not willing to do what it takes to protect us from... some sort of nuclear slingshot aimed at America, from Gaza (or perhaps a "sharpened pole" long enough to reach our shores):

This is what she came up with:

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"President Obama should stop apologizing for this great nation and start defending it," she said, in one of several lines in her 30 minute speech that won big ovations from the crowd. Other bits of Cheney wisdom that went over big:

• "Somebody needs to keep reminding this administration that foreign terrorists do not have constitutional rights."
• "The media has played this up as a confrontation between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama. I prefer to think of it as a constructive dialog -- between a two-term vice president and a one-term president."
• "Regardless of massive public disapproval of the healthcare plan, this president rammed it through on a partisan vote. President Obama's phony numbers are about to become our very real problem."
• "One of the greatest thinkers of our time, in my opinion, is Charles Krauthammer."

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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."

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The trouble with waiting for history to vindicate you, though, is that it takes so damn long -- as in centuries after the fact, which is a little too late for gloating.  So it’s not hard to understand why a group of Cheney-philes is trying to speed up the process a bit.

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.

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I used the issue of torture as a previous assault on the social contract and I think it's been born out that as a nation we no longer believe in an absolute prohibition on torture. You'll recall that at one time President Bush very scrupulously insisted "the United States doesn't torture," an odd turn of phrase which was later adopted by President Obama as well. Aside from the legal exposure, I think it was the old tribute vice pays to virtue in that they at least paid lip service to the idea that torture was wrong (even if they winked and nodded to the bloodthirsty sadists while they did it.) Today what we hear are full-throated defenses of torture. They've successfully defined this deviancy down.

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As I noted yesterday, the group run by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol released what is certainly one of the more repugnant political ads of the last decade, if not the most repugnant.  It's the type of McCarthyite act which would, if we had any minimal standards in our political culture, result in the shunning of Cheney and Kristol by all decent people (instead, it will likely land the Vice President's daughter on multiple Sunday talk shows where she can pose as an expert on national security).  The ad brands Eric Holder's DOJ the "Department of Jihad" because it employs 9 lawyers who previously represented Guantanamo detainees (including Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who successfully represented the Guantanamo-plaintiffs in the 2006 Hamdan case before the U.S. Supreme Court).  The ad darkly asks of these lawyers: "whose values do they share?," and labels 7 of those unidentified DOJ lawyers "The Al Qaeda 7."  The premise of the ad is as clear as it insidious:  any lawyers representing accused Terrorists are of suspect loyalties and allegiances, are devoted to "jihad," and are sympathetic to, if not part of, Al Qaeda (this profoundly ugly smear campaign began with the always-unhinged Andrew McCarthy in National Review, who branded such lawyers "terrorist sympathizers").

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Meanwhile, U.S. forces captured the most powerful Taliban leader they've grabbed since the war began in 2001, and intelligence sources tell Newsweek they've broken up a big al-Qaida plot in Yemen and Pakistan as well. More on that later too.

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Serving as a board member of Keep America Safe, the neoconservative propaganda organ responsible for that ad, Cheney is also a Fox News commentator and a regular guest on many other outlets. In those roles she has usually escaped tough questions, but there are some signs of weariness with her vacuous bluster.

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Following this basic model, Liz Cheney -- daughter of the former vice president and a former State Department official herself -- has gathered a group of conservatives of a particular ilk into a group she’s calling “Keep America Safe.” However, it’s not exactly a Bush administration in exile. Considering some of the people involved -- Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, blogger Michael Goldfarb and Cheney herself -- it might be more appropriate to call it a Cheney administration in exile.

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So while Liz Cheney might not be her famous father, she does share a last name with the former vice-president, and that was apparently enough to make her the surprise guest at the event. That, and perhaps the political benefits for her? She's suggested in the past that she might run for elected office one day soon, and as Politico's Jonathan Martin observes, while there, she certainly sounded like a candidate, at least in her attacks on President Obama's foreign policy.

Obama has a desire "to placate, to appease, not to cause offense," Cheney said. "And it’s this desire that drives the president to plead with our enemies to talk at all costs. It puts America in a position of weakness, one that will not and cannot secure American interests.

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In a debate with the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, who in his most recent column suggested that her father is a "crazy old coot," Cheney said she thinks her father would "probably rather be fishing in Wyoming, given his druthers"  but, throughout her appearance, said that he's speaking out because he genuinely believes the Obama administration's policies have put the country at increased risk.

She did take Robinson's criticism in good humor, however. Though she said there wasn't a moment when she was a teenager when she agreed with Robinson's description of her father, she did tell stories of the times she crashed his car growing up, which allowed for a little levity in what was otherwise a pretty serious debate.

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When Wolf Blitzer opened up that touchy topic during an interview on CNN, the vice president responded with his trademark snarl. Mary Cheney seems to resent questions about her personal life, too, except when she is promoting her book or marketing Coors beer.

Embarrassing as the contradictions between his gay daughter and his homophobic party may be, however, the vice president should be grateful that the mainstream media hasn't turned the spotlight on his son-in-law.

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Bush hoped with his latest speech to reanimate his early iconic stature in the week after the terrorist attacks, when the whole country and world were unified in sympathy. Even "evil" Syria and Iran offered assistance in tracking down al-Qaida. Bush prompted us that "the wounds of that morning are still fresh." His evocation of emotion was an attempt to filter memory. We were guided to remember the trauma as the primal experience for sustaining Bush's politics. By touching the source of pain he tried to redirect it into an affirmation of every twist and turn he has taken since the fateful day.

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