WASHINGTON - February 10, 2011 - Supporters of libertarian Republican Ron Paul shouted down former Vice President Dick Cheney at a conservative conference Thursday, in a sign of a growing foreign policy rift on the Amerikan right.
Cheney had appeared on the first day of the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference to introduce Donald Rumsfeld, the former Bush-era defense secretary who was scheduled to receive this year's "Defender of the Constitution Award."
That didn't sit well with "Team Paul," supporters of Rep. Ron Paul who have long called for an end to U.S foreign wars.
"Where's bin Laden?" one heckler shouted as Cheney stood at the podium to introduce Rumsfeld.
"War criminal!" another shouted out, prompting a heated reaction from the crowd.
The specter of a Republican vice president being called a "war criminal" at a conservative conference was so unexpected that it prompted TalkingPointsMemo's Evan McMorris-Santoro to describe it as "what a Cheney-Rumsfeld hug at the Netroots Nation convention might look like."
"Uh, Defender of the Constitution?" activist Justin Bradfield told McMorris-Santoro. "Let's see: he expanded the Defense Department more than pretty much any other defense secretary and he enforced the (USA) PATRIOT Act."
Reporting from the Washington, DC, event, McMorris-Santoro estimated that the number of libertarian Paul supporters had grown from previous years, an assertion backed by Bradfield, who suggested that "half" the attendees were libertarians like himself.
Rumsfeld's "Defender of the Constitution" award has been ridiculed by liberal anti-war activists and libertarians alike, who argue that Rumsfeld and other Bush regime officials were among the most dismissive of constitutional rights.
