Liz Cheney is not some moderate maverick Republican who is breaking with her party on policy. John Nichols, in the Nation takes a similar tack: I sit silently in acknowledgment, as one does, when karma swings low and performs its function. If Cheney is punished by her own party, I will not applaud, but I also will not sob. The sword she’s falling on is one she has spent her political career brandishing. No stranger to bad takes, the NYT’s Charles Blow argues that all-conservatives-are-evil-especially-Cheneys so we shouldn’t think of her heroic stand as heroic.īut her present position does not expunge her past positions. Jack Shafer’s silly piece, How Democrats Learned to Love the Cheneys, has already been roundly dunked on, but there were quite a few others in the mainstream media/left media. The bad takes were not, of course, solely the provenance of the right. So, the least-bad option for now is just to give Trump as little attention as possible.Īs Miller writes in today’s Bulwark: “The very people who misjudged the consequences of letting Trump’s lies spread, who hid in the Capitol as it was sacked by a mob, who lost their majority in the Senate-are now arguing that the party’s only choice is to act the exact same way they did before all of this shit went down.” But there is not any other clear blueprint for how to get him to make way for a successor. Waiting for Trump to die is obviously not a pleasant way to look at the party’s future, to say the least, even aside from the fact that it requires awaiting a deus ex machina event the party cannot control. So we get this kind of sage punditry: Back in January, the veteran anti-anti-Trumper, Dan McLaughlin (perhaps better known as the Baseball Crank) penned a full-throated denunication of Trump:Ĭasting him into the outer darkness to wail and gnash his teeth, whence he can never return as a candidate for office, is the only way to put an end to this and resume the business of focusing the Republican Party again on winning elections and on using public office to deliver what voters want from government.Ī few days ago, he argued that “Liz Cheney is no longer the leadership House Republicans need, or deserve.”Īs for Trump? Baseball Crank now thinks we should just basically wait for him to die. National Review’s editors also denounced the move to cancel Cheney over her failure to embrace Trump’s “mendacious claims” about the election.īut others have rushed forward to insist that even though she may have been telling the truth, it is, in fact, a brilliant stategery for the GOP to make the embrace of Trump’s Big Lie the litmus test for leadership in the party.Īs Tim Miller notes, Republicans are once again deciding to humor a bitter and vindictive Donald Trump and asking themselves: What could possibly go wrong? The Wall Street Journal editorial board took a break from indulging conspiracy theories to warn against the defenestration of Cheney. There were notable exceptions, and some surprises. As we’ve seen repeatedly, the sophistry of politicians is quickly mirrored by the rationalizations of the commentators of Conservtism Inc. The GOP’s purge of Liz Cheney has inspired more than its share of tendentious logic-twisting from the usual suspects. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)īad politics makes for bad punditry, and this week did not disappoint.
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