CommentsGUEST COMMENTARY - Your partners in crime hit me up for nickels and dimes, The man you were loving couldn’t never get clean, It felt out of place, my foot in his face, But he should’ve stayed where his money was green… – Bob Dylan, Where Are You Tonight?
I’m not sure what’s more enervating: liberals embracing Liz Cheney or the Left fist-bumping Henry Kissinger. But here we are. We can’t escape two of the most grotesque shadows of our past. No one needs either of them as allies, even fleeting ones. They contaminate all they touch.
Liz Cheney didn’t do the one thing she was meant to do: convince any of her fellow Republicans that Trump was a threat to the Republic and, by extension, the “values” of the Republican Party, because Trump’s “values” are now symbiotic with those of the GOP. So, she was a failure. In fact, the Cheneys–Dick, Lynne & Liz–have been agents of political corruption since Dick’s tenure in the Nixon Administration, steadily eating away at whatever frail ethical foundations the party may have had for three decades, rotting clean through by 2001–the detritus providing the seedbed from which the toxic tendrils of Trumpism sprouted. So it is fitting that this is her political end, undone by the savagery of a party her family re-shaped in its own depraved image.
Ideologically Liz Cheney was pretty much in lockstep with Trump, backing nearly every vicious social and economic policy he sent to the Hill. (She voted for Trump bills 93% of the time.) She might as well be Stephen Miller’s political doppelgänger. Liz only diverged from Trump on those few occasions when he went soft on foreign policy–on Russia, Iraq, Syria, North Korea and Afghanistan. She’s always been a guard dog of her father’s ruinous legacy. Her objections to the J6th insurrection were to its overtness, which risked exposing the way the continuity of power–real power–is maintained in the US, from one administration to the next, with little real change in policy. Call it the Deep State if you like–though it’s really just “the State.” If anything, it was the clumsiness of Trump that offended the sensibility of the Cheneys. Because Liz and Dick both know from experience there are subtler ways to fix the outcomes of elections.
During her abbreviated tenure in Congress, Cheney voted Liz Cheney against restoring the Voting Rights Act, against raising the minimum wage, against the Equality Act and the Equal Rights Amendment, against the George Floyd Act, the Build Back Better and Infrastructure bills, against the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, against the $35 Insulin bill, against the Women’s Health Protection Act and against anti-gas price gouging bill. A real hero for our time…
“Costs them everything”…? Liz Cheney’s Net Worth: $14.7 million.
(Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch, where this article was featured. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: [email protected] or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.)
