All three of the newspapers to which we subscribe ran articles today hyping Liz Cheney, and bemoaning what her primary loss means to the Republican Party. This from the New London Day/ AP:
Liz Cheney’s resounding primary defeat marks the end of an era for the Republican Party as well as her own family legacy, the most high-profile political casualty yet as the party of Lincoln transforms into the party of Trump.
It’s probably fair to say that the Republican Party hasn’t been the party of Lincoln since it sold its soul in order to gain the presidency in 1876, but if you don’t want to go back that far, you can start in 1968 with Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
Liz is now going to be cast as a heroine, and should she decide to run as a third party candidate, the press will surely idolize her, even if by running she risks handing the presidency back to a Republican, for we don’t know who she’ll take votes from, because we don’t know what information the low information voters will be fed by the press.
The Republican Party is the party of fascism, and has been for quite some time. We should not forget, though many of us will, that Cheney was fine with Trump’s lawless behavior and voted not to impeach him the first time he tried to steal an election, voted with him on just about everything he wanted to do, and has shown absolutely no interest in preserving the right of non-Republicans to vote. It’s all well and good that she’s against taking control by coup, if voter suppression fails to do the job, but we’re a poor excuse for democracy if we think that makes someone a hero.
Being against a coup is pretty much the least we can expect from our politicians, and it is frightening that the vast majority of Republicans have no problem with taking power that way. That’s the party that Cheney helped build, and we mustn’t forget that, but here’s an easy prediction: the press will do all it can to urge us to forget just that.
A sort of epilogue: The lionization of Cheney calls to mind the actions of our own senator, Lowell Weicker, during the Watergate hearings. He was properly outraged at what Nixon had done. The thing is, he wasn’t considered a hero, nor had the Republican Party degenerated so low that it felt it necessary to expel him from its ranks. He was just one of many Republicans who, in one way or another, recognized Nixon’s criminality and recognized their own obligation to do something about it. It is a measure perhaps of how low one of our major parties has sunk, and how normalized that sinking has become, that the press feels the need to make a hero out of a person who is simply doing what any right minded person would do. The fact that there are so few right minded people in the Republican Party is the real story, and its the one that the press should be emphasizing.
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