Right Web

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Keep America Safe (KAS) was founded in late 2009 by two key figures in the hardline nationalist advocacy community, Elizabeth Cheney (daughter of Dick Cheney) and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol. The group operates like a standard neoconservative pressure group working to build public support for keeping the United States in a state of constant military mobilization. The group’s 2009 mission statement bears the hallmarks of neoconservative discourse: a call to arms (“United States remains a nation at war”), an homage to the country’s purported moral exceptionalism (America is “an unparalleled force for good in the world”), a rebuke of the “weakness” of liberals (the Barack Obama administration “is weakening the nation”), and an articulation of the “peace through strength” axiom (America must be “feared and respected by our enemies”). [1]

As of February 2010, KAS had three board members: Kristol, Cheney, and Debra Burlingame. According to her bio on the KAS website, “Debra Burlingame is the sister of Charles F. ‘Chic’ Burlingame, III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. She is the co-founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America and a director of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum Foundation at the World Trade Center.” In addition, Burlingame is a former “producer at Court TV where she covered dozens of civil and criminal legal proceedings ranging from the OJ Simpson trial and the Clinton impeachment hearings to the Microsoft anti-trust case.”

When KAS was launched in October 2009, Politico reported that several former aides to Sen. John McCain were also working with the group, including Michael Goldfarb, a Weekly Standard contributor; Aaron Harison, who was identified as KAS’ director; and Justin Germany, a video producer known for his McCain campaign video titled “The One,” which caricatured then-Sen. Barack Obama as a messianic figure. A key backer of the group has been Mel Sembler, an important Republican Party donor who has supported a number of other rightist groups, including the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute and Freedom’s Watch, a rightwing advocacy outfit originally led by Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and funded by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Sembler, who has long-standing ties to the Cheney family, told Newsweek, "I love Liz Cheney and what she's doing," adding that he would be "as supportive [of Keep America Safe] as my budget will allow." [2]

A core KAS raison d’etre appears to be publicizing the activities of Cheney, who since the election of President Barack Obama has emerged as a major voice pressing for a return to the militarist foreign policies championed by her father during the George W. Bush presidency. In late February 2010, the KAS website featured a video of Cheney’s presentation at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). While claiming during her presentation that Obama’s national security policy was the greatest “concern,” Cheney also highlighted a number of other rightwing talking points vis-à-vis the Obama administration: “In the year that President Obama’s been in office, we’ve learned a lot, haven’t we? We’ve learned he’s not going to govern from the center. We’ve learned he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism and he’s going to travel the world apologizing for this great nation. We’ve learned he’s going to raise everybody’s taxes. He’s going to try to expand the size of the federal government until it permeates every aspect of our lives and every corner of our land. He’s going to try to turn our health-care system over to the federal government. And we’ve learned that he wants to give terrorists constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent.”

Other KAS activities include using its website to highlight public opinion polls that appear to put a favorable light on the group’s agenda, running fear-mongering ads that claim Obama administration officials are soft on terrorism and question their patriotism, and disseminating petitions, including a “Save Gitmo” petition in early 2010 that called for keeping the Guantanamo Bay detention facility open because it is purportedly “a safe, secure, and humane facility where the United States can and should detain terrorists.” The group also apparently intends to engage in lobbying. According to the Inter Press Service, “under the rules of its incorporation, KAS will be permitted to lobby Congress and endorse political candidates.” [3]

Explaining the rationale for creating the group, William Kristol told Politico, "The Left has dozens of organizations and tens of millions of dollars dedicated to undercutting the war on terror. The good guys need some help, too." [4]

The group has endeavored to revive and shape rightwing critiques of liberals in the wake of Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign. One item posted on its website was an article from the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer titled “Decline Is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the End of American Ascendancy.” Originally published in the Weekly Standard, the article made a number of peculiar claims, including: “[T]he new left-liberal internationalism goes far beyond its earlier Clintonian incarnation in its distrust and distaste for American dominance. … For what might be called the New Liberalism the renunciation of power is rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the corruptions of power—the old Clintonian view—but rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.” [5]

Claiming that the Obama administration is engaged in “strategic retreat,” Krauthammer bemoaned the administration's rejection of the phrase “global war on terror”; the “unilateral abrogation” of missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic; “indecision on Afghanistan”; the failure to treat Iraq as a “prize ... of great strategic significance that the administration seems to have no intention of exploiting”; support for a “Chavista caudillo” in Honduras; and “heavy and gratuitous America pressure on Israel.” [6]

“In a word,” claimed Krauthammer, “it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline—to make America essentially one nation among many.” He concluded,”[W]ile globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. ... Do we really want to live under unknown, untested, shifting multipolarity? Or even worse, under the gauzy internationalism of the New Liberalism with its self-enforcing norms?” [7]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.