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Cheney: Wrong War, Wrong Time, Wrong Tactics
Wrong War. Wrong Time. Wrong Tactics. I think that’s emblazoned on the Cheney Family Coat of Arms. No one needs more evidence of that than the drama that has just played out in the House GOP Conference. But I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury her.
Liz Cheney may be a book-smart woman. But she and her supporters have been awfully stupid since January. Maybe that comes with believing that power is your birthright and not something to be earned from the people you are supposed to represent. Liz Perry – she’s been Mrs. Philip Perry for 28 years now – clings to her father’s name like a hereditary title. It is the source of her power. She was made the Chair of the House Republican Conference in January 2019 despite the fact that she had only been in the House for a single term. In her four years in the House, she has never proposed legislation that had been signed into law. So, the Cheney name is all she really has.
But who needs personal accomplishments? She went straight from college into a job at the State Department. (Who doesn’t?) Then came law school and a high-profile lobbying job with the “consulting” firm led by Richard Armitage. With her father’s election as Vice President, it was back to State. In other words, she took all the obvious career paths that most of her Wyoming constituents take.
And now, she has become a “hero” to the Left and the disgruntled establishment for fighting an internecine war with her party and her constituency. Because of her name recognition, she is one of those politicians who has never really had to engage in retail politics – climbing the greasy pole from local office to local office, working your way to state government, before trying the national stage – and all while building coalitions and creating political capital. Like so many others before her, the smartest person in the room also becomes the dumbest.
What Liz and her supporters cannot seem to come to grips with (or by nature they are oblivious to) are these basic facts:
- You may win future elections without Donald Trump but you will not win them without his supporters. His constituents are your constituents. A mainstay argument of the anti-Trump crowd is the former President’s “underperformance” compared to the GOP House and Senate candidates. Even if that’s true, the proportion of voters that supported both greatly outweighs the difference. And for someone like Cheney, she underperformed Trump by some 8,000 votes.
- Whether you’re a politician or a pundit, the near-universal response to the allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election has been stupid. Not just stupid, but mind-numbing levels of stupid. A working democracy depends upon a mountain of faith that the process is on the up-and-up. If 40 percent of the American public believes the 2020 elections were fraudulent, that is not a Donald Trump problem. That is an existential problem for the Republic and therefore it is your problem. The proper response should have been, “We know that there are doubts and we are going to do everything we can to allay these fears.” Instead we got, “You people are stupid. Shut the hell* up and go away.” Unfortunately, that toothpaste can’t go back in the tube. Donald Trump may fade away but the result of the glee so many take in attacking his supporters will not.
- We all know the phrase, “The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations.” It’s mainly used as an argument on race relations and the “dumbing down” of standards. But it applies everywhere. How you treat people will eventually alter their trajectory. If you constantly accuse someone falsely of bad conduct, if you prosecute them for your own political gain, they will eventually take the attitude that they will live down to the accusations. I mean, if you’re going to do the time, why not actually do the crime? And so it is with January 6. There were six deaths surrounding the events of that day, five of them medically induced. The only unnatural death was that of Ashley Babbitt at the hands of a Capitol Hill Police officer. However, if the politicians and the pundits continue their accusations of “armed insurrection,” they will eventually get one. They may see it as an opportunity to finally “deal” with Trump supporters, but that is a beast that, once unleashed, may not be as easy to control as they think. The second American Civil War would not look like the first one. Forget Gettysburg, think Beirut. And Northern Ireland. And Syria. And this crusade SecDef Austin is waging against his own troops is the epitome of stupid. When the shooting starts, loyalty is not going to be decided by a uniform.
Originally, Liz Cheney moved to Wyoming to claim her hereditary title in the US Senate. Her plan in 2014 was to stab another Republican – incumbent Senator Mike Enzi – in the back. (Anyone sense a pattern here?) When it became obvious that she on course for an embarrassing spanking in the primary she backed off and settled for the state’s at-large House seat two years later. Now, she is reduced to being one ineffectual vote among the minority. Maybe Joe Biden will reward her loyalty with a return trip to the State Department as US Ambassador to Iraq.
*Not the word I wanted to use.
Published in General
No, most anti-Trumpers don’t. And that’s one of the reasons you got Trump. Burying your head in the sand is not an option. Being “noble” about what your opponents get away with really doesn’t make you a better person. And as a lawyer you should know the legal term for “whataboutism.” It’s called “precedence.”
Hell-to-the-double NO. As I said, this is a crisis of confidence. What in God’s name makes you think I, or anyone else would have confidence in a commission put together by this crowd? With the FBI in the lead? The same FBI that led the nation down the Christopher Steele rabbit hole? Adam Schiff or Eric Swalwell as chair? Maybe roll Bob Mueller out of the Alzheimer’s ward for another bow? I have no use for Soviet-style political show trials.
”Yes, your honor, my client raped the girl but you should have seen what she was wearing. She was asking for it!”
No, that dog doesn’t hunt. She took her stand during the second impeachment vote and was not penalized for it. She handily survived a vote to remove her 145-61. She made her stand when it counted and wasn’t punished. And then, instead of turning to the matter at hand – working on a strategy to thwart the excesses of Prime Minister Klain’s Progressive Dream Agenda – she wanted to continue her assault on Trump and members of her own caucus. That is what she paid the price for: fighting the wrong war at the wrong time with the wrong tactics.
I would like to say that she is totally unelectable, but given six of the last seven presidents I guess anything is possible. She’s the darling of the Democrats right now, the new John McCain, that is, the person they say they could vote for but never would, the one that they slobber over in public and laugh at in private. But, no. Liz is not going to be Speaker or President. If Trump needed a 17-candidate field to win the GOP primary with a 33% base, Liz would need the entire GOP caucus to run to split the vote down to her support level.
Holding up John Boehner as an example, though? He’s one of the real “heroes” of the “How did we get Orange Man in the White House” saga. As Speaker, Boehner did more to make Trump politically viable than anyone else in Washington.
Again, your immediate problem is not Donald Trump. As many, many people have pointed out, Trump is a symptom in the body politic, not the disease. Until you come to grips with the fact that many of your heroes are, in fact, causing more harm than good you will get someone worse than Trump by magnitudes of a thousand. It may not be Biden, it may not even be anyone whose name is presently known, but they will come. That is, unless you commit yourself to cleaning up the rot in Washington and fighting for the future and getting your head out of the past.
Looks like this is going to happen.
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/nation-world/bipartisan-commission-to-investigate-january-6-capitol-attack/507-95910527-9370-408d-9ea5-be70e244d8bc
The fact that this needed to be pointed out in this exchange is very telling in regards to the intellectual seriousness of your debate opponent.
I think we can all agree that what was really going on on January 6 was a mass attempt at “suicide by cop,” for the most part unsuccessful.
Though I somehow suspect that won’t be how this FBI describes it.
Hopefully some Republicans will show some spine.
Like so: https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/13/house-republicans-defy-the-january-6-narrative/
It was a riot. They were under resourced for security based on known intelligence. They already know the most organized ones were clowns and didn’t even bring weapons. It was one of Alex Jones ex employees. Joe Briggs or something like that.
There are thousands of hours of footage from Jan. 6th that the DOJ is not letting people see, because it would demonstrate just how laughable the whole “insurrection” narrative is.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all. I think the FBI’s laughable characterization of the Scalise shooting provides ample evidence that federal law enforcement agencies serve a political agenda (as if their treatment of the previous President wasn’t sufficient to make that clear).
If the first questions aren’t about what Nancy (and Mitch) knew, when did they know it, and what did the do / not do about it, then the entire exercise will prove itself to be the complete joke it is intended to be.
Is that political agenda in service to Communists? If not, to whom?
In service to Bigger and Better Government, Always.
A distinction without a difference!
You know their motto: Build Back Bigger!
Or did I get that wrong?
The original Orange Man Bad.
So why won’t Republicans defund the FBI? And the rest of these politicized and incompetent security agencies? There are valid functions they perform. Strip them out and create new agencies and kill off the rest.
The press might be mean to them.
Indeed. The press would scream that they must be trying to hide something.
Those who believe in individual liberty also include a large contingent of those who see a need for civil order. Among that same contingent, however, are many who are not action-oriented and exhibit a reluctance to act in the face of abuses of power so when the elected representatives and the electorate are close to evenly divided formal action is hard to come by. Republicans have been mostly led by these types who will not endorse the kind of action taken at the Capitol on 1/6, even given no criminal intent. We used to call them NATO, no action, talk only. I suspect that I know more than a few people who are like those who got involved in the action on 1/6. Not bad people but many are experiencing the effects of the efforts to curtail individual freedom and destroy the America they have known and action is their only response..
@ejhill – I just listened to an interview Liz Cheney gave to Hugh Hewitt this morning. Despite Hewitt’s herculean efforts to engage her in the importance of a team effort to oppose Biden’s misguided policies in the here and now rather than a fixation on the past with Trump, she stubbornly persisted in making her interview all about the former president and blaming him for inciting riots on January 6. She unrealistically sees herself as the savior of the GOP through an unwavering dedication to do whatever she can to see that Trump is punished by focusing on what she perceives are injuries to the US Constitution.
Vanity of vanities.
I am rapidly loosing patience with people who are more interested in Trump’s past maleficence and completely ignore Biden and the Democrats current maleficence. It is almost as if Ms. Cheney is intentionally covering for the current administration.
She did the same thing talking to Bret Baier. Mr. Baier is a solid and fair interviewer. Ms. Cheney was obnoxious and condescending and basically attacking Fox news.
I don’t watch much of Fox, but that is the type of Media that will reach Republican viewers. A Republican attacking Fox for giving her a platform, seems off. She lied about her prior statements. Everything is still about Trump.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/liz-cheney-lied-about-her-role-in
Exactly! And these same people were the first to criticize PRESIDENT Trump on the slightest of supposed infraction within seconds and they are noticeably completely silent in Biden’s total destruction of the country, economy and Constitution. Useful idiots. All.
I am really enjoying this Liz Cheney beatdown. Well done. lol
I was talking about this on a different post. The Principles First people are all doing this on overtime. It’s embarrassing.
So she’s learned nothing from this.
She is a drama Queen, attention whore, who is just auditioning for some consultancy or Board position in Daddy’s network. Good riddance. She had to go to very Red Wyoming to even get elected. And she was rejected for the Senate first before settling for the House.
That’s because they don’t specify WHOSE principles.
I don’t think there’s an “almost” about it.