I never thought I’d write a post defending Liz Cheney, but I was driven to it by the Impeached Insult Comedian. I was initially skeptical of Cheney’s sincerity because of her lineage and ideology but she is right on one crucial thing: DEMOCRACY. Without it, nothing else matters.
When Chairman Thompson stepped in it yesterday and said that there would be no criminal referrals to DOJ from the 1/6 committee, it was Cheney who cleaned up his mess. Bennie is nice, Liz is not but she’s right about this.
Liz Cheney is out for blood. She believes that Trump has besmirched her party’s name and reputation. It’s true that many of us think the same thing of the Bush-Cheney administration but they willingly left office in January 2009. There was no coup plot. Rudy Giuliani may have even been sober at that point.
Both privately and publicly, Cheney has been pushing for criminal charges against Trump and the leading coup plotters. She’s all in.
Liz Cheney matters because her people are the ones that need to be won over. It’s unclear how many on the right think the Dipshit Insurrection was okay. Because of her ideology and lineage, Cheney has a chance of reaching them in a way that no Democrat can.
I’m not typically in favor of the whole “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing but extraordinary times call for drastic measures. During World War II, FDR allied our country with a bloodstained Communist tyrant, Josef Stalin who had vodka in common with Mayor 9/11. Defeating Hitler was our top priority, so we fought alongside the Soviet Union. It was the right thing to do.
A lesser example of the same principle but a better analogy to Liz Cheney occurred in the same war. FDR liked Winston Churchill personally BUT FDR was anti-imperialist and Churchill romanticized the British Empire. Churchill was the right leader for the UK at that time BUT one reason he lost the 1945 election was his insistence on holding on to the empire.
Liz Cheney’s views on most issues are horrible but her political courage is undeniable. Her refusal to buckle to the House GOP Caucus cost her a leadership position. Almost alone among Republican congressional leaders, she did the right thing and stood against the coup. We know that McConnell and KMac originally felt the same way, but they blow with the wind. And the prevailing hot air comes from the Kaiser of Chaos at Mar-a-Dorn.
Americans have a long history of coming together in a crisis. The Dipshit Insurrection and Trumpism pose an existential threat to our democracy. That’s why Liz Cheney is willing to put aside her differences with Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin and vice versa: our democracy is at stake and without it, nothing else matters.
Repeat after me: without democracy, nothing else matters.
The last word goes to Metallica followed by Chris Stapleton: