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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
Long ago someone reminded me not to ascribe malice when stupidity is as likely a cause, so the almost is me being charitable to her.
It’s become very clear to me that it is necessary we have a president strong enough to have control of the executive branch of government. Why we have accepted that the president should be subservient to his branch underlings instead of the actual and legitimate head is a perversion of our constitution.
The whole regulatory system is a perversion of Article I. Congress should not be allowed to legislate away its ability to legislate.
And that is the point. Multiple investigations are needed to restore confidence in our system. Democrats don’t want that because 1) they’re afraid wide-spread fraud will be uncovered, 2) if no fraud is found, that eliminates their basis for HR-1, and 3) even if fraud is found but the outcome isn’t changed, that gives justification for states like Georgia to pass reform laws that will make it harder for them to cheat.
But 4) investigations might reveal the election was in fact stolen and Trump won. That is their primal fear . . .
I don’t have a problem if Cheney uses her last name either. When we got married, I asked my wife if she wanted to keep her last name as she had a professional reputation with it. She said she wanted to use my name because it didn’t have any letters that went below the line. Go figure . . .
My husband and I were discussing the odd conundrum of Stefanik vs Cheney and our overall conclusion is that the Republican base is far more dynamic, nuanced, and fluid than the politicos give us credit for.
We have rapidly shifted to what is the biggest priority to preserving our country as new information has been revealed in each election cycle. Establishment types seem to think that Bush era is still the right course. It’s great that she voted on the right policy issues, but she’s shown she doesn’t know where the new priority is. Stefanik seems to have a clearer view of it in spite her voting record.
We aren’t in economy rebuild mode anymore. We are fully in fighting the rot in our government apparatus, from FBI to CIA. The voting public sees those as far bigger threats to our country right now. They see abandoned rule of law and weaponized enforcers and deep seated corruption.
First, responding to 9/11, then dealing with our budget, then fixing our domestic economy policy, now rule of law in our federal government. We are shifting faster than politicians are. They need to shift with us or be prepared to be replaced rapidly.
She might have to vote a little bit RINO because she’s from New York or whatever. RINOs are fine and are way better than Democrats as long as they are careful about limiting their damage. I would honestly vote RINO on some things. The ones during the ACA repeal were thoughtless and reckless.
The insurrection narrative is baffling.
Where were the “insurrectionist’s” scary black guns? How do you take out government without them? With Gadsden flags?
How were Ashli Babbitt and everyone else in that corridor a threat when police in tactical gear and sub machine guns were right there behind the crowd?
The gaslighting is phenomenal.
And it was after a summer with a literal insurrection in Seattle and cities burning from coast to coast. The legacy media and the entire Democrat party yawned. That people ostensibly on the right have joined them in calling what happened on Jan 6th an insurrection makes my blood boil.
The progressive idea is that the smartest people should be unhindered by political considerations in doing what is right for us. Their implicit assumption is that being intelligent is synonymous with being good. This is the fatal flaw in their agenda, and the one that we need constantly to work on. They are rarely stupid, but they do rule in their own self-interest. We need to keep pointing that out in order to undermine the absurd self-confidence they have in their right to rule. And if we just think of their self-interest as taking payoffs or bribes, we aren’t thinking hard enough about what motivates them.
Public choice theory.
Ashli Babbitt would not have been the sole casualty from hostile gunfire if 1/6 were an insurrection.
That’s exactly right. Not enough weapons and not enough organization. All of the weapons were found away from the capital. It’s just dumb that we even have to talk about it.
Pelosi keeps calling it an armed insurrection. Except nobody was armed and it wasn’t an insurrection.
Imagine if we had an honest media.
We are experiencing enough now to gain a true sense of what made Patrick Henry say “give me liberty or give me death”, hope I got that right.
And it’s usually just the opposite. Authoritarian ideologies tend to draw from the most educated first. It’s was that way with the Nazis and it’s that way here in America with the Communists.
Nothing will tip you off to an authoritarian quicker than the phrase, “voting against their self interests.” See those dumb people over there? They obviously don’t understand what is in the their best interest. So we must take the right of self determination away from them and take care of them.
I’ve been hearing that phrase almost my entire life.
I think there are some Rs who share some of these same concerns. Especially 1. Either because they too have been guilty of fraud, or because they were united with the Ds in making sure DJT didn’t win re-election
Yes, and the next tip-off is when they decry “populism” when the form of government is supposed to be a democracy, or a representative republic.
But maybe the biggest is when they say, as some loser said recently after the British elections, “The voters have let us down” Yeah some Labour lackey actually said that, out loud!
Too hard. You need to give us something easier to imagine. At least for starters. Maybe we could eventually work our way up to imagining we had an honest media.
There you go.
Let’s hope. But don’t people mostly still think that, while Congress is just awful, their own rep/sens are perfectly fine?
It’s the ultimate win/win for the politician. “I am a hero because…”
1. I helped create this new leviathan bureaucracy to show you that your needs are my first priority.
2. When the leviathan bureaucracy that I created doesn’t do the job I promised and instead makes your life miserable, my office is here to help you turn what used to be a one-day process into a six-week adventure.
Re: Stefanik v. Cheney
”There will be no litmus test to belong to the Republican Party.”
Your support or non-support for Trump is your litmus test. (And, yes, that’s cutting both ways.)
”We believe in the Big Tent.”
But… but… _________ is not a conservative!
Ok. Let’s get to the brass tacks. Neither of these two women deserve to be Conference Chair. Neither has seniority among the caucus, neither are legislative powerhouses (although I think Stefanik leads in the “Rename the local Post Office” sweeps), and neither is going to be seen as anything but a demographic slot.
And while I like to rag on Cheney for not using her married name, neither does Stefanik. I will say that if anyone ever voted for Stefanik because of her father then he must supply some pretty damn good plywood. (Founder/CEO of Premium Plywood Products of Guilderland Center, NY) Which, in the long run, is a better legacy than never ending wars without victory.
Stefanik is going to be fine. She knows what she’s doing. She doesn’t create damage.
While I have met, worked for, and like Ms. Stefanik, I think it’s pretty obvious that this is all about limiting damage to the party’s electoral prospects. And I agree with the point of your post: Ms. Chaney was a liability in that regard.
Elise works hard and has been a stalwart when needed. I’m fine with this change.
Yeah, but do you? Keeping track of individual politicians can be daunting if they aren’t widely known. I guess keep track of what bothers your neighbors and come election time, find out how your reps fell on that issue and campaign against them locally.
I don’t. But there are people who think that it’s OK to have a representative or senator whose politics they abhor, so long as s/he brings home the goodies for his/her district.
Deserves got nothing to do with it.