Soon to be former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney is the flavor of the month for liberals. The cause of the undeserved adulation is her condemnation of Donald Trump and his role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
She lost her Republican Party primary precisely because she turned on Trump, who is still loved by the masses of Republican voters. Conversely, the idol worship from Democrats has reached bizarre levels, including support for a Liz Cheney presidential campaign.
Of course that was Cheney’s goal all along. She saw attacking Trump as her own ticket to the Oval Office. She always has been a rank opportunist. She began her political career challenging Republican Senator Mike Enzi by claiming that the arch conservative wasn’t conservative enough. Voters in the very red state of Wyoming weren’t fooled and she later had to settle for its lone congressional seat.
Liz Cheney and her father Dick Cheney are among the Republican establishment class. Cheney père was the man chosen to guide dim bulb George W. Bush as his vice president. That’s how they work. The white masses are not to be trusted with their choices and more reliable people are chosen to keep them in line.
But Trump was cut from a different cloth. The establishment didn’t want him, but he surprised them with his win and insisted on going his own way. Of course they got what they wanted from him, including a long sought after tax cut for rich people, more deregulation and a foreign policy that upped the imperialist ante by punishing countries such as Iran, Venezuela and Cuba for daring to exist at all.
Trump was indeed different, and fought with party leaders and refused to concede after his November 2020 defeat. His army of incompetent lawyers, like Rudy Giuliani, ran around the country trying to throw out votes wholesale. They were laughed out of every courtroom but Trump didn’t care. He riled up his supporters and even attempted to interfere with the vote counting process in states directly.
That sort of behavior is anathema to the Cheneys and their ilk. After all Dick Cheney helped Bush 43 steal his election in November 2000. Sending a mob into the Capitol is amateurish and not their thing. Doing the dirty work of voter suppression was and Bush the younger cheated his way into office when his brother the Florida governor took mostly Black Floridians off the voter rolls. In 2004 they repeated the crime, this time in Ohio and the craven John Kerry refused to fight for every vote.
But why do so many Democrats feel the need to fall at Liz Cheney’s feet? She is a conservative Republican after all, voting with Trump 93% of the time, and she is her father’s daughter, declaring that water boarding is just fine and shouldn’t be considered torture. She opposes abortion and said that democrats are “killing babies” through rarely used later term abortions.
Why does it matter if a Republican condemned the January 6 riots? It should be enough for Democrats to have spoken up. Why the need for validation from the opposition? Most Democrats don’t really see themselves as belonging to a political party, but rather as members of a social group. The game of hard nose politics is anathema to them, as they prefer to think of themselves as superior beings who can look down on the MAGA rabble. Yes, they want abortion to be legal and see the value of government programs and abhor the idea that they might be biased in some way. But their party’s determination to be more of a marketing scheme and fundraising machine to serve elite interests has impacted them.
Rather than declare that conservative Republican Liz Cheney is of no interest to them and that they can fight Trumpism just fine without her, they swoon like kids with an inferiority complex. They are no less indoctrinated than the January 6 mob but never see themselves that way. Politics for them is about liking and being liked. They liked Obama and didn’t want to hear inconvenient truths about Libya or how he bailed out the banks while allowing Black people to lose their homes. Trump’s election was a great trauma for them. Six years after the fact they still can’t believe that 60 million people voted for him or that Hillary Clinton couldn’t manage a basic get out the vote effort.
Their joy at Biden’s election was disturbed on January 6, 2021, when Americans sought to overturn an election result. Of course their own government’s interference in democratic processes around the world is something they rarely think about. They just know that their beloved government had been attacked by Trump’s deplorables. Even though Biden’s inauguration was just two weeks away they were stunned again and thrown into a state of despair.
While other Republicans ran for cover Liz Cheney appeared like magic. Expressing their love of the constitution and country and government. She was from the other camp, but not really, because she spoke against what they don’t like, namely the bad orange faced man. It was kismet and the star struck kids were never the same.
They had already rehabilitated Cheney’s boss George W. Bush. He has a crush on Michelle Obama and paints pictures of puppies and just isn’t very Trumpian. If the election thief and war criminal who invaded Iraq can be forgiven, then a Wyoming congresswoman can too.
The love affair isn’t really surprising, after all Democrats refuse to make any demands of their own party. Joe Biden didn’t raise the minimum wage or provide student loan debt relief like he promised. His friends in corporate media have made a big deal of the Inflation Reduction Act, which allows oil drilling on public lands and doesn’t act on negotiating Medicare drug prices until 2026 and then only for ten drugs. Yet they love him and his $50 billion Ukraine boondoggle and attack anyone who suggests that they might want to make demands. Instead they make excuses for the people who stab them in the front.
Liz Cheney is a perfect match for apolitical people who are afraid of their own shadows. While MAGA stormed the Capitol they rarely bring themselves to protest anything under any circumstances. So today Liz is their star and tomorrow it will be someone equally ridiculous. The duopoly chugs along ignoring liberals for the simple reason that they have no reason to pay attention to them. They are an easily fooled, fake opposition and are treated accordingly.
Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents . Her work can also be found on Twitter , Telegram and Patreon . She can be reached via email at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Making those assumptions about liberals is no different than racism. I feel slightly black.
Being supportive of Trump just because he rejected the establishment as he pursued his self-serving goals is beyond my comprehension, so I leave it up to you.