Because Sarah Palin turned out to be a train wreck, and because they have no one else

Who are the Republicans going to run for President in 2012? With Mark Sanford having fallen from grace, and Newt Gingrich not catching on because too many people DO remember 1994, and Tim Pawlenty trying to paint himself as Jefferson Davis along with Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin proving to be every bit the train wreck we knew she was, the Republicans are left with Mitt Romney, who will give the Christofascist Zombie Brigade fits, or -- whom?

The Wall Street Journal thought that Dick Cheney should run, but since The Dickster's health is questionable (especially without a regular supply of freshly dead human souls to feed him) perhaps another Cheney, equally adept at lying and fabricating and bellicose rhetoric against everyone east of Greenwich Mean Time would fit the bill:

Liz Cheney looks nothing like her father, but it is clear who he is. She was introduced as “our favorite vice president’s daughter” at a recent gathering of conservative women here. She kept invoking him in her speech, conveying his best regards, and likes to share cute stories about Dad trying to master his new BlackBerry.

Like her father, Ms. Cheney speaks in understated, almost academic cadences, head veering down into her notes. She also shares his willingness to pummel President Obama in stark, disdainful tones, not so much criticizing as taunting him.

“Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake,” she said, “are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?”

By speech’s end, the crowd was standing, and the former vice president’s daughter was being mobbed for photos and hounded to run for office.

Liz Cheney is “a red state rock star,” declared Rebecca Wales, one of the organizers of this event, the “Smart Girls Summit.”

“The future of the Cheney message,” added a conservative blogger who goes by the name of Fingers Malloy (a rare man in this crowd, and even rarer, one with a Mohawk). He also called her “one of the fresh faces of our movement.”

The Republicans are desperate, and only when they're desperate do they bring out the women. The continued adoration of Sarah Palin by so many Republican men even after she's proven herself to be nothing more than the aging beauty queen and aspiring stylista on other people's money that the sane among us always knew she was shows just how clueless they are. Put something with tits out there, their thinking goes, and we'll get the women and show how with-it we are at the same time.

But I think we underestimate the money machine behind the right wing, and how much the military-industrial complex has to gain from a return to a Cheney foreign policy. Liz Cheney may look like her mother, with that blonde sunniness that hides an appallingly empty heart, but her worldview is decidedly that of her father. She both literally and figuratively is Cheney-in-a-dress.