Sometimes you witness a grift that is so brazen that all you can do is respect the hustle. That’s where I’m at with Liz Cheney. Yeah, she’s a ridiculous person playing out a petty feud to the detriment of the nation, ignoring a multitude of issues that actually affect everyday Americans in her pursuit to get the orange man. But man was her transition from electoral defeat to scamming donors seamless.
It’s almost like she’s had lots of practice at being a Washington swamp creature, so engrained in the beltway cocktail circuit that it just comes naturally. This is a woman who had her campaign website rerouted to a donation page for her new scam PAC before her defeat was even finalized.
Cheney isn’t going to just go after Donald Trump, though. She’s going to help get Democrats elected, and she’s also being specific in her targets. Namely, she’s really upset at Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
There’s hypocrisy and then there’s whatever the heck I just witnessed watching that clip. Again, you almost have to respect the brazenness that Cheney showcases. She doesn’t even pretend to be impartial or consistent in her approach to pretty much anything.
In this case, she’s claiming that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have somehow disqualified themselves from office by objecting to single states being certified following the 2020 election. First of all, Liz Cheney is not the arbiter of who is qualified to be in office in the United States. That’s a decision that rests in the hands of the voters, whether she likes it or not, and clearly, her respect for “democracy” goes only as far as it serves her selfish, single-minded interest.
Normal, non-elite Americans care about inflation, the economy, disastrous foreign policy decisions (of which Cheney has been at the center of most), the border crisis, and the weaponization of government institutions, including the House of Representatives. Cheney doesn’t care about any of that, though, choosing to form her entire political personality around the supposed blight of “election-deniers.”
But here’s the other thing. She doesn’t actually care about people denying the results of elections. In fact, two of her co-members on the January 6th committee have not only gone along with the illegitimate president claim (regarding George W. Bush and Donald Trump), but they formally voted to not certify the results following the 2004 and 2016 elections. Not once has Cheney condemned them. She’s also never condemned Hillary Clinton for spreading election denialism nor has she chastized Stacey Abrams. Why? Because if she so, she knows the donations would dry up. She is reliant on the very people she claims to oppose.
That really perfectly encapsulates what Cheney is. She’s not a principled warrior looking to rid the government of those who question the results of elections, otherwise, she’d be targeting those on both sides of the aisle. Rather, she’s a partisan hack looking to elevate herself with the ultimate goal of running a spoiler presidential campaign in 2024.
Returning to Cruz and Hawley, all they did was use legal means to object to certification for reasons they felt were legitimate, which is exactly what Cheney’s new friends did. In the case of Cruz, simply asked for a formal investigation into possible voter fraud. But it doesn’t even really matter if you agreed with him or not. What he did was allowed under the law, wasn’t unprecedented, and is in no way disqualifying. Cheney’s hypocritical attacks only show her to be exactly what we all suspected she was.