In Defense of Liz Cheney

I never thought that I would be in the position of having to defend the spawn of Satan, Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney, but she has demonstrated that she has a bigger set of cojones than all of those quivering ass-kissing Trump sycophants in Congress combined. Respect, Liz.

Liz Cheney was clear and concise in her reasons for why Donald Trump should have been convicted in the Senate impeachment trial and permanently banned from ever holding elected office again, statement:

“On January 6, 2021 a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol to obstruct the process of our democracy and stop the counting of presidential electoral votes. This insurrection caused injury, death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.

“Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

“I will vote to impeach the President.”

Seditious insurrectionist Donald Trump, who has made a career out of defensive projection — attributing one’s own unacceptable urges to another — recently tried to coopt the use of the term Big Lie, i.e., that the election was stolen from him through massive fraud, into claiming the 2020 election is itself the Big Lie. Joseph Goebbels would be so proud of his little boy Donny.

For students of history, you know that Adolph Hitler’s biggest lie was his revisionist claim that Germany was not defeated in World War I in 1918, but rather was betrayed by internal groups (“international Jewery”). This stab-in-the-back myth was spread by extreme right-wing groups, including the Nazis.

This is exactly the same Big Lie propaganda technique that Donald Trump and his propagandists in the conservative media entertainment complex are propagating today. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Stick to the Fascist playbook.

Liz Cheney will not be a party to it. Cheney slams Trump’s attempt to brand 2020 election ‘the Big Lie’:

Rep. Liz Cheney made clear Monday that she will continue to publicly denounce former president Donald Trump over his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen[.]

Cheney (R-Wyo.) brushed aside GQP warnings Monday after Trump issued a statement attempting to commandeer the term “Big Lie,” commonly used to refer to the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, by asserting that the term should now refer to President Biden’s election victory.

Cheney quickly condemned Trump’s comment as well as anyone who supports his statements about the election.

“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” Cheney tweeted. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”

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On Monday, Cheney told a closed-door conference hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute at Sea Island, GA, that “We can’t embrace the notion the election is stolen. It’s a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy,” according to CNN.

“We can’t whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump’s big lie,” she said while being interviewed at the conference by former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), according to the network. “It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed.”

As in all cults, heretics who defy the “Dear Leader” must be burned at the stake, er, purged from the cult. And so the Stalinist show trial and purge of Liz Cheney from the personality cult Party of Trump appears to be imminent.

The worst craven coward of all, Kevin McCarthy, who has made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ass of seditious insurrectionist Donald Trump, is now doing Dear Leader’s bidding to remove Liz Cheney from party leadership.

Axios reports, Scoop: McCarthy trashes Cheney on hot mic:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday he’s “lost confidence” in Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) during a moment of candor caught on a hot mic, a tape reviewed by Axios shows.

What he’s saying: “I think she’s got real problems,” McCarthy told Steve Doocy off-air ahead of a live “Fox and Friends” interview. “I’ve had it with … I’ve had it with her. You know, I’ve lost confidence. … Well, someone just has to bring a motion, but I assume that will probably take place.”

• • • The comments, made amid seeming cross-talk with Doocy, outlined how the House conference chair could be removed by a vote from the chamber’s Republican members.
    • McCarthy’s comments contrasted from the nearly 6-minute, on-air interview where he told Doocy he’d heard members concerned about Cheney’s ability to carry out her job as a party leader.
    • “This is about whether the Republican Party is going to perpetuate lies about the 2020 election and attempt to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6,” Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler said in response to McCarthy’s aired Fox interview. “Liz will not do that. That is the issue.”

Why it matters: To date, McCarthy has left some of his more pointed criticisms to his lieutenants, but this firmly puts him on the record — even if it was accidental.

• • • Top Republicans told Axios’ Jonathan Swan and Alayna Treene last week that Cheney could be removed within a month.undermining the House GOP’s 2022 midterm message which is premised on a lie.

Cheney is undermining the House GOP’s 2022 midterm message which is premised on the Big Lie.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post explains, The effort to dump Liz Cheney is the consequence of a party that lost its way (subcriber content):

“The growing effort to remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from the third-ranking Republican leadership position in the House further accelerates her party’s full capitulation to Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. The move against Cheney is a sign of political cowardice. While shocking, it is not surprising for a party that has lost its way.”

“The majority of Republican lawmakers appear to have stopped believing in truth — or lack the courage to speak the truth. Cheney is not among them. She has been fearless in calling out Trump’s lies about a stolen election, and she has been forceful in rebutting the former president whenever he repeats the falsehoods that led to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.”

His colleague Paul Waldman at The Post writes, Liz Cheney’s impending fall shows us how afraid Republicans are of their base:

But today, Cheney’s willingness to stand up for a couple of basic principles — principles that in a sane party would be so self-evident as to not even require discussion — has her on the threshold of being purged from the GOP, or at least from her position in the House Republican leadership. One need not weep for her fate to understand that it illustrates something very dark about her party, something that will continue to characterize it for at least the near future — especially through the 2024 presidential election.

While there are other Republicans who acknowledge the fact that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, what distinguishes Cheney is that she has been doing so vocally and voluntarily, reiterating not just that undermining U.S. elections is a bad thing, but that it’s also bad for Republican officeholders to continually lie to their constituents. That she does this as the third-ranking member of the GOP House leadership is deeply offensive to those of her colleagues most in thrall to Donald Trump.

[T]he person who may determine her fate is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who now appears to be ready to toss her overboard. “I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message,” McCarthy told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning.

This ought to have been predictable to those familiar with McCarthy’s history. When faced with a controversy his first impulse is often to do the right thing, but once the blowback comes from his right flank, he quickly reverses himself. After the Jan. 6 insurrection he said, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters” — then was forced to fly to Mar-a-Lago to grovel before Trump.

In that, McCarthy is a perfect congressional leader for this period in the Republican Party’s history. Unlike his Democratic counterpart, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), he does not rule his caucus with an iron fist, imposing order and keeping everyone moving in the direction he sets. His far-right members know they can push him around.

But in various ways, that will be true of anyone who wants to lead the GOP. We’ve stopped repeating “This is not normal” since Trump left office, but it is absolutely not normal that in one of our two major parties it is considered an unforgivable apostasy to say that the last election was legitimate and that lying to voters is wrong. Think about that. I can promise you that every Republican considering running for president in 2024 certainly has.

There will be times in that primary campaign when the candidates will be asked to say whether the 2020 election was stolen. They know that the true answer — of course not — will not be permitted. Telling the truth would make them the Liz Cheneys of that race — with zero chance to win, left only to plead that they are still Republicans in good standing. So they’ll craft answers that pander to their base without quite saying Trump won, something like “There were serious questions about the integrity of the vote, but like it or not Joe Biden is president, and that’s why I’m running.”

They know that most of their party has bought into Trump’s lie that the election was stolen; according to a recent CNN poll, 70 percent of Republicans say they don’t think Biden legitimately won the election, and 50 percent believe that there exists “solid evidence” proving that Trump actually won.

If any 2024 contender contemplated disabusing the party’s base of those beliefs rather than pandering to them, they surely rejected the idea in an instant. They may have thought back to 2016, when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called Trump a “con man,” Jeb Bush called him “a liar and a whiner,” and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) called him a “pathological liar,” a “narcissist,” a “sniveling coward” and a “serial philanderer” — and each of them were mowed down in turn, because those things were exactly what GQP primary voters wanted.

The 2024 candidates aren’t going to make that mistake again. Whatever the GQP base wants to hear — any lie, any conspiracy theory, any ugly impulse forged in the depths of their resentments and fears — the candidates will mirror it right back at them.

Unfortunately, that may not do them much harm at the ballot box, just as the party’s nihilistic, conspiratorial turn probably won’t keep it from regaining control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections.

Politicians seldom have much incentive to stand up to their base, no matter what that base thinks — unless their integrity prevents them from doing so. But in today’s GOP, integrity and courage is in awfully short supply.

The anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian, and yes anti-American and disloyal MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Donald Trump are the enemies of American democracy.

Jennifer Rubin at The Post adds, When will Liz Cheney and the GOP break up?

[Cheney] is not only criticizing the ex-president, who incited the Jan. 6 insurrection, but also the right-wing media and elected Republicans who perpetuate this lie. She is also telling a majority of Republican voters who believe this claptrap that they are wrong.

[T]he Party of Trump could well boot her out, given that its members have shown themselves to be spineless, self-deluded sycophants. Moreover, it is very likely that Cheney will face a primary challenge. It will be interesting to watch the GOP denounce a member of its own “royalty” — a daughter of a former vice president, ardent critic of President Barack Obama, and defender of carbon-based energy, a strong military, tax cuts and deregulation.

More interesting than what the GOP does, however, will be what she does. At some point, it becomes ridiculous for Cheney to remain in a party that is inextricably linked to the Big Lie she properly denounces. Cognitive dissonance of this magnitude cannot be sustained forever.

* * *

Cheney has many options because her personal and political identities do not depend on the approval of unhinged right-wing media. It seems her greatest fear is not losing her seat or being disinvited from right-wing confabs, but rather losing her political soul and empowering anti-democratic (small “d”) forces.

[T]he scarcity of other Republicans with any principles beyond retaining their place in the MAGA universe tells us how far the party has sunk.

Rubin concludes “Cheney and the MAGA-infused GOP are heading for an ugly divorce.”

Just a reminder to Kevin McCarthy: Satan, i.e., Dick Cheney, shot his hunting buddy in the face and his buddy apologized to him for the stress on the vice president and his family. What do you think Satan is going to do to you if you mess with his daughter?