Liz Cheney Buries GOP Traitor Mob, Trump, Putin

Listen to Cheney speak out against the Florida Monster and his mob of traitors.

One thing I'm always gonna hold against the Republican party is ever making me have to have any respect for a Cheney.  She's still a horrible person, but she's just found a limit.  She's bumped up against the new reality of the GOP, which is... it doesn't have a reality.  It's become a cult that runs entirely on a Land-of-Make-Believe, constructed for their believers.  It's more of a church program than it is news now.  A frickin' trolley should go dinging past Tucker Carlson's desk at the beginning of each show.

Republicans are doing this to Liz Cheney because they don't trust their own base anymore. They know they have a cult on their hands and they're scared to fight against it because they know how stupid and gun-happy these folks are. So they're trying to appease them, saying, "We're with you, cult! Please don't kill us! We get it, you're a cult and we'll cast out anyone who opposes you, so please don't target us. And stay brainwashed and useful. Maybe you'll destroy the country, but at least we'll make some money off you before that happens."

That's what they're trying to do. What they're actually doing is sending out a signal that there's no place for sane, reasonable people in their party anymore. They've had to pick between being a cult and being a party, and they looked at their base and had no confidence that it's not mostly cult now. I'm not sure if that's right or if it's not, but they're hoping that the Republicans who aren't in the cult will be trained to just hate Democrats enough to side with the cult anyway.

But that cult's becoming scary enough to spook a lot of the herd. I don't know if the Cheney/Romney/Kinzinger Republicans will defect enough to start voting for Dems, but you can damn betcha that they won't vote for the Gaetz/Greene/Boeberts, either. I know Republicans who are embarrassed as hell by them. So it's a dangerous thing even just on a political level for their party... which is all Republicans care about at this point. They had to choose between party and country and they chose party, or cult at this point. I don't know how much that's going to hurt them. In a sane and righteous world it'd be suicide... but they've become so brainwashed on FOX/Newsmax/OAN/YouTube propaganda that sanity and righteousness isn't really part of the equation anymore.

Kicking Liz Cheney out for refusing to lie SHOULD come back to bite 'em in the ass, and bite 'em hard. But considering what's become of the conservative base at this point, I'm not sure it will. They've got too many people who are just full-on way-yonder crazy and flat-deck fuckin' stupid that they may get away with it. And woe betide this country if they do, because this shit isn't just a matter of "oh, the party I don't like is gonna be in power again for a while and it'll suck but we'll survive it." Nope... it's a structural reformation of what America was into actual totalitarian theocratic fascism.

They need to recognize it, decide that even if they end up holding the reins of power in it that a fascist state is a bad thing, and back away from Trump. Unfortunately, the party's too full of idiots (Greene, Boebert), cowards (Graham, Cruz -- who's maybe the biggest coward I've ever even heard of, how they let that guy represent them is bewildering to me, the lack of pride that takes), or criminals (Gaetz, who's a sociopath to the bone). And whenever they have anyone who's the-Republican-version-of-principled, they're gonna punish 'em, like they did to Cheney, and like they did to Romney, who got booed about a week ago.

They're gonna be short-sighted and keep on backing Trump. It's sick, but it's where they're at.

Liz Cheney Has Only Herself to Blame

The representative from Wyoming is taking a stand against an authoritarian streak in the Republican Party that she helped cultivate.

MAY 6, 2021

Adam Serwer
Staff writer at The Atlantic


Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney
CAROLINE BREHMAN / CQ-ROLL CALL, INC /GETTY


Liz Cheney, the representative of Wyoming, the daughter of a former vice president, and a lifelong conservative Republican, is facing a purge.

Cheney’s transgression? She has continued to insist, truthfully, that former President Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election are false, after having voted to impeach him in March for inciting a mob that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the result.

Yesterday, Steve Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in the House, publicly advocated for removing Cheney from her leadership post as the third-ranking House Republican, and replacing her with Elise Stefanik, who has obsequiously amplified Trump’s lies about voter fraud. “This is about whether the Republican Party is going to perpetuate lies about the 2020 election and attempt to whitewash what happened on January 6,” Cheney’s spokesperson, Jeremy Adler, told The New York Times. “Liz will not do that. That is the issue.”

The Times reported that Republican leadership, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, hoped that “after surviving [a] February vote of no confidence, Ms. Cheney, as an elected leader, would make like the rest of the party and simply move on.” This is a ridiculous claim; the Republican Party has not moved on at all. The falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump has become the justification for voter-suppression laws in Republican-controlled states across the country. A majority of Republicans voted against certifying the election even after the Capitol riot; fully 60 percent of Republicans believe that the election was stolen.

“I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law,” Cheney wrote in a Washington Post op-ed yesterday. “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

The conflict here does not stem from Cheney’s refusal to move on from the lies that sparked the Capitol riot, but from the fact that the Republican Party has embraced those lies as foundational to Republican identity in 2021. Trump has not moved on, and therefore the GOP base has not moved on, and therefore the legislators beholden to that base must repeat the lie as a condition of good standing in the party. Cheney’s fall will ensure that ambitious Republicans eschew the folly of respecting the outcome of elections that the GOP loses. They will all understand that the only acceptable outcome of political contests is Republican victory, and that any system that allows for the possibility of defeat is illegitimate.

As I have written in the past, the belief that the 2020 election was stolen, like the claim that former President Barack Obama was not born in America, is not amenable to fact-checking. The assertion of fraud is an ideological statement that political opposition to the Republican Party in general, and to Donald Trump in particular, is illegitimate. Even if Joe Biden got more votes, this logic holds, those votes should not count, because the people who cast them are not Real Americans the way Trump supporters are. To oppose Trump is to be The Enemy, and to be The Enemy is to surrender any claim to fundamental political rights.

Even a lifelong conservative Republican like Cheney becomes The Enemy if she is willing to uphold essential democratic rights—such as the opposition’s right to govern if it wins the most electoral votes—above the whims of King Trump. Cheney’s brave stand looks likely to cost her the leadership position she holds, and has left her isolated within the caucus, one of the few Republicans who have chosen their vow to the Constitution over their loyalty to the party. Yet the party’s rejection of the rule of law is also an extension of a political logic that Cheney herself has cultivated for years.

During the Obama administration, Cheney was a Fox News regular who, as was the fashion at the time, insisted that the president was secretly sympathetic to jihadists. She enthusiastically defended the use of torture, dismissed the constitutional right to due process as an inconvenience, and amplified the Obama-era campaign to portray American Muslims as a national-security threat.

Until the insurrection, she was a loyal Trumpist who frequently denounced the Democratic Party. “They’ve become the party of anti-Semitism; they’ve become the party of infanticide; they’ve become the party of socialism,” she said in 2019. Her critics now, such as Scalise and the buffoonish Representative Matt Gaetz, formerly gushed over her ability to bring, as the Times put it in 2019, “an edge to Republican messaging that was lacking.”

That “edge” was Cheney’s specialty from the moment she emerged as a rising star in the GOP. In 2010, Cheney launched a McCarthyite crusade against seven unnamed attorneys in the Obama-era Justice Department who had previously represented terrorism suspects held in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Bush administration’s assertions of imperial power in the War on Terror violated the Constitution many times over—the conservative majority on the Supreme Court agreed—and the lawyers who represented detainees were defending the fundamental constitutional right to counsel. They were affirming the integrity of the American legal system; Cheney smeared them as terrorist sympathizers, as The Enemy.

“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Cheney lamented in her Washington Post op-ed. But her colleagues are merely following her example.

“Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al-Qaeda Seven,” a 2010 ad from Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, intoned ominously, as if it were referring to the actual 9/11 hijackers and not the attorneys who had represented Gitmo detainees in court.* “Whose values do they share?" The Enemy has no rights, and anyone who imagines otherwise, let alone seeks to uphold them, is also The Enemy.

This is the logic of the War on Terror, and also the logic of the party of Trump. As George W. Bush famously put it, “You are either with us or with the terrorists.” You are Real Americans or The Enemy. And if you are The Enemy, you have no rights. As Spencer Ackerman writes in his forthcoming book, Reign of Terror, the politics of endless war inevitably gives way to this authoritarian logic. Cheney now finds herself on the wrong side of a line she spent much of her political career enforcing. Her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, infamously announced that America might have to employ “the dark side” in its fight against al-Qaeda, forgetting the entire point of Star Wars, which is that the dark side ultimately consumes its adherents. Not until the mob ransacked the Capitol in January, it seems, did she begin to understand that millions of Americans believe the things their leaders tell them.

Cheney’s McCarthyite campaign against the Justice Department lawyers was blunted when a group of former Republican officials, including Ken Starr and Theodore Olson, released a letter chastising Cheney. Starr described the attorneys’ work as being “in the finest tradition of the profession.” John Adams, the second president of the United States, the letter pointed out, had famously represented the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. In effect, those Justice Department officials did what Cheney is attempting to do now—defend fundamental democratic rights from the cynical authoritarianism of shortsighted political partisans.

Unfortunately, Cheney and her allies won their earlier fight for the soul of the party. During the Obama era, the Republican Party became ever more hostile to the fundamental rights of religious and ethnic minorities, and ultimately chose Donald Trump, a man who attacked those rights as an existential threat to the nation, as its leader. Cheney’s courageous stand against the party of Trump is a stand against a party she helped build, a monster she helped create. The tragedy is not that she might suffer for her folly, but that American democracy will. Her latter-day epiphany is welcome, but it also comes far too late.

* This article has been updated to clarify the identity of the detainees represented by the lawyers.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/liz-cheney-trump-fraud/618820/

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She could have taken a stand years earlier, even during the Bush years, but she didn't. She helped her daddy "vet" possible VP candidates for George W Bush, then kept secret files on them. Sorry, as much as I appreciate her and others taking a stand now, the time for that was years ago, long before Trump.

It might help if states like Florida stop putting white, terrorist, fascist, cracker barrel boys like DeSantis in the Governor's seat, jus' sayin.'

NYT The Morning (5/13/21):

Liz Cheney’s ouster is a sign of the Republican Party’s growing discomfort with democracy.

‘Dangerously anti-democratic’
The Republican Party’s big recent moves — the ouster of Liz Cheney from a leadership position and the passage of new state voting laws — do not have much immediate impact on Americans’ lives.

Cheney’s removal doesn’t change congressional Republicans’ approach to President Biden’s agenda, and the voting laws will mostly start to matter next year. With Biden in the White House, Democrats controlling Congress and many Americans still focused on Covid-19, internal Republican debates can sometimes feel like an exhausting partisan sideshow.

They are not. The last few months have the potential to be a turning point for the country because of what is happening inside the Republican Party.

I don’t say that lightly. Readers of this newsletter know that I don’t believe any political ideology has a monopoly on truth. Democrats have their own problems, including an elitist intolerance for debate about some subjects and a set of Covid fears that are at times disconnected from scientific evidence. But the issues inside the Republican Party — involving its attitude toward democracy — are of a different order of magnitude.

In a defiant speech from the House floor before her ouster, Cheney said, “I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law.”

Six significant months
It’s worth stepping back for a minute to think about what has happened since November.

After losing an election, many Republican leaders spread the lie that their opponent had cheated. On its own, this lie resembled the historical tactics of authoritarians, who often try to delegitimize any political party but their own. The similarity became starker when multiple elected Republicans either encouraged or excused a mob that violently attacked the U.S. Capitol.

A peaceful transfer of power involves both the peaceful part and a willing transfer. It depends on the ability to acknowledge defeat. Never before have so many elected members of Congress from one party tried to disrupt a clear victory by the other party.

At first, that Jan. 6 attack seemed as if it might cause party leaders, like Senator Mitch McConnell, to reassert the importance of democratic principles. Instead, Republicans who called out Donald Trump’s falsehoods found themselves marginalized. The central message of Cheney’s ouster is that Republicans must lie, or quietly endorse Trump’s “big lie,” to remain Republicans in good standing.

The same thing is happening in state Republican parties. In Virginia this week, Glenn Youngkin won the Republican nomination for governor. By résumé, he is a country-club Republican, having served as co-C.E.O. at the Carlyle Group, a well-connected investment firm. To win the nomination, though, Youngkin evidently decided that he needed to promote false conspiracy theories. So he did.

In more than 10 states, including Texas, Florida, Georgia and Arizona, Republican lawmakers have responded to Trump’s defeat by moving to make voting more difficult. It’s true that some of these measures are defensible on other grounds and others may have less impact than Democrats claim. But the intent of the laws is clear, and they will surely have some effect.

Provisions that target heavily Democratic areas — like Georgia’s limits on drop boxes — are particularly blatant. “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, has told The Times. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”

A few states have also given state legislators more power over election administrators, potentially making it easier for politicians to reject an election’s result. These provisions may be even more dangerous than the hurdles to voting, especially since they are an explicit response to Trump’s big lie, as Joshua Douglas of the University of Kentucky has written.

Could all of these moves come to little, much as Trump’s postelection flailing did? Yes, that’s one possible outcome. But it is not the only one. In a way that would have been unfathomable a few years ago, one of the country’s two major parties is taking steps that would allow it to overturn the outcome of a future election.

And what now?
For Republicans, the question is whether they are willing to break with their own party, or at least criticize it honestly, to speak up for democracy. That’s not an easy thing to do. There are many Americans who believe in both democracy and a conservative agenda — less regulation, strict abortion laws, few gun restrictions, tight border security, strong support for police departments and churches. These Americans no longer have a comfortable partisan home.

If even a small portion of Republicans insist that the party supports democracy, they can succeed. As several experts have pointed out — including Anne Applebaum, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the most successful strategy for beating back a political party’s authoritarian shift has depended on defections among people who otherwise agree with that party. That’s why Cheney, Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney and other Republicans criticizing Trump’s big lie are significant.

The same experts advise Democrats to welcome the courage of those Republicans and not obsess over their many other disagreements. Cheney’s stance matters because she is a pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-regulation, deeply conservative Republican.

“The Republican Party is sliding into authoritarianism at a terrifyingly rapid clip,” Jonathan Chait has written in New York magazine. “That fate of American democracy is the biggest issue in American politics.”

For more:

The ouster of Cheney may embolden her and allow “a household-name conservative to take her case against Trumpism far beyond a Capitol conference room,” The Times’s Jonathan Martin writes.

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