Cheney is no defender of democracy
Liz Cheney: Not the Republican hero that we needed in 2021
Cheney is no defender of democracy — she's a dinosaur who misses the old days when GOP corruption was more genteel
https://www.salon.com/2021/12/20/liz-cheney-not-the-hero-that-we-needed-in-2021/
From the moment that Donald Trump first ran for president in 2015, there's been a longing — from not just the mainstream media, but from large numbers of Democrats — for Republican heroes who will stand up to him. The tiny percentage of almost entirely elite Republicans who objected to Trump became known as "never-Trumpers" and were exalted in #Resistance circles as patriots and heroes, even though their actual power over the GOP was non-existent. They existed more to prop up this illusion that the Republican Party was once an upstanding party, and that it's only after the advent of Trump that the GOP lost its way.
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For one thing, there is no better form of the Republican Party to "take back." The GOP has been the party of Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy for longer than most Americans have been alive. Trump's mentor, infamously sleazy lawyer Roy Cohn, was influential in Ronald Reagan's administration, at least until he was disbarred and died of AIDS. Reagan's race-baiting, you'll recall, was hardly more subtle than Trump's. And before Trump's Big Lie, we had George W. Bush's "WMDs in Iraq." Jonah Goldberg may play at being the upright conservative now, but he only came up in GOP politics because his mother was involved in destroying the life of a young Monica Lewinsky. The fantasy of the "good Republican" relies on ignoring literal decades of actual Republican behavior.
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In 2021, no one more illustrated this gulf between the fantasy of the heroic Republican and the actual scumminess of the GOP than Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
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It's not just that her father was one of the architects of the original big lie, the "WMDs in Iraq" nonsense that was produced to justify the unjustifiable invasion of Iraq. Until Trump tried to overtly steal the 2020 election, Cheney stood by her man through thick and thin. She voted with Trump 93% of the time during his four years in office. When Trump attempted to blackmail the Ukrainian president into falsifying evidence for an anti-Biden conspiracy theory in 2019, Cheney refused to vote to impeach him. She also joins in with every Fox News smear of Democrats, showing that she's fully committed to the GOP's long-standing habit of resorting to dirty tricks.
Most importantly, Cheney opposes voting rights. She supported the long line of Trump judges that were being installed in order to gut the Voting Rights Act. Even after she became an outspoken Trump critic, she vehemently refused to back any kind of legislation to prevent the ongoing state-level efforts by Republicans to make sure Trump's next coup is more effective. She doesn't take issue with Republicans trying to wind down democracy or steal elections. She just wants to put a gloss of respectability on the process. A paperwork coup, where power is obtained by preventing people from voting and by corrupting the election systems, is just fine by Cheney. What grossed her out was the way Trump and his allies kept doing obvious coup-stuff on camera.
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