Liz Cheney

Former vice president Dick Cheney, who died on Monday at age 84, loathed Donald Trump. In a 2022 election campaign ad for his daughter, Liz, a congresswoman from Wyoming, he declared: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” Yet Cheney was more responsible for Trump’s rise than almost anyone else in the Republican establishment. He helped to mastermind the calamitous Iraq War and preached the unitary executive theory of the presidency. Instead of vilifying Cheney, MAGA-world should offer him a bouquet of appreciation. Recall that it was during the 2016 South Carolina primary that Trump first showed his real independence from the folderol surrounding the Iraq War.

It wasn’t easy being a Trump administration staffer in January 2021 as the flock of political appointees were left with a difficult decision to make. They could stay loyal to the president despite the establishment outcry over his repeated claims of massive electoral fraud in the 2020 election and the events of the January 6 Capitol riot. This came at a huge risk, as multiple former Trump staffers over the years have described to me the difficulties of finding a job outside of Trumpworld at that time. Some opted to continue to work for the president in the hope that his political brand would recover — a gamble that would eventually pay off.

Joe Biden is not going gently into that dark night, politically or cognitively. He is going down with large, bold actions. The latest is a mass commutation for some 2,500 “nonviolent drug offenders.” Biden’s justification is that they were sentenced under laws that have now been overturned as the country has moved to more lenient treatment of all drug offenses and eliminated differences between laws penalizing crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. Those are reasonable justifications, but they are far from the whole story and far from the way the White House is selling the action to voters and friendly journalists. The vast majority of the prison terms were actually given to dealers or violent offenders, mostly members of criminal gangs.

In the 1870s, Gustave Flaubert assembled Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues, a humorous collection of “received ideas” and clichés then current in French society. A new version needs to be produced for contemporary America. As in the original, the humor would often turn on the contradiction or subterfuge implicit in the word or phrase. “Affirmative action” would merit an entry, since it is supposed to be about battling discrimination when in fact it enshrines discrimination in law. So would the current favorite, “Continuing Resolution” (“CR” among the cognoscenti). The phrase carries the aroma legislative diligence.

President Joe Biden still has forty-two days left in office, but rather than go out in a blaze of glory, he appears to be embracing the “quiet quitting” craze so popular with younger generations, in which employees “continue to put in the minimum amount of effort to keep their jobs, but don’t go the extra mile for their employer.” President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, is giving an early Christmas present to the 77,289,122 people who voted for him by overshadowing the current commander-in-chief on the international stage. As Israeli paratroopers deploy to Syria and the Russia-Ukraine war rages on, it’s Trump who is wearing the pants in the on behalf of the US overseas.

Vice President Kamala Harris is spending millions on new ads against Green Party candidate Jill Stein in swing state Wisconsin, warning potential supporters that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump. The advertisement also attempts to smear Stein by asserting that she has links to KKK leader David Duke and Russian president Vladimir Putin. “You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep,” a voiceover says. “Stein isn’t sorry about swinging the 2016 election to Trump.” The ad was paid for by the Democratic National Committee but approved by the Harris campaign.Why would Harris be using air-time to attack Stein just two weeks out from the election? There are a couple of theories.

I don’t understand why Liz Cheney thinks we would trust Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff with our children when we know there’s a non-zero possibility that the would-be first gentleman will attempt to knock up our nanny, but apparently that’s what they're going with on the campaign trail these days. For years, I’ve suggested an essential method to deciding who to support for president would be based on who you trusted to run a McDonald’s for a day or watch your children for an afternoon. Perhaps intimidated by the former president’s success at the former measure, Cheney suggested at her event with Vice President Harris this weekend that the latter measure would disqualify Donald Trump — who she endorsed in 2020 — as an unacceptable giver of childcare.

Welcome to Thunderdome. Liz Cheney is campaigning with Kamala Harris today in Wisconsin at Ripon, known as the birthplace of the Republican Party at the Little White Schoolhouse. It was there in 1854 at a church meeting that Whig and Free Soil Party members gathered to form a “great irresistible Northern party, organized on the single issue of the non-extension of slavery.” This was even then pretty aggressive language for the Episcopalian who called the meeting, but not for Horace Greeley, who publicized it to the nation. Whatever Liz Cheney says today about how important it is to elect Kamala Harris will no doubt equal the historical significance of that moment, at least according to Rachel Maddow.

Welcome to Thunderdome. Without fail, in every cycle, some media commentator will pen a ludicrous piece about why Republicans should want to lose. They follow a similar, all-too-familiar script: if the Democrat wins the presidency, they will be restrained by the power of the Congress and the Courts from advancing a truly radical agenda; historically, their victory will lead to a sizable midterm backlash setting up for a better election the next time around; and the sooner the GOP rids itself of the baggage at the top of the ticket, the sooner it can elevate younger rising stars who haven't been thoroughly villainized yet by the national media. This argument is bunk — and the author is usually not stupid enough to actually believe it themselves.

Kamala’s first interview as nominee falls flat Vice President Kamala Harris — and CNN — failed to impress in the first sit-down and unscripted interview she has given since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee forty days ago. Harris spoke for just eighteen minutes and opted not to explain how and why her policy positions have changed so drastically in the past four years, instead offering that her “values haven’t changed” and stood by her positive post-debate assessment of President Joe Biden’s cognitive state. Perhaps most confusing was Harris’s insistence that Americans are looking for a “new way forward” and to “bring America into a new decade,” which conveniently left out the fact that she has been in office for at least a third of that decade.

President Joe Biden said the quiet part out loud Tuesday, telling donors at a campaign event that he might not be running for re-election if former president Donald Trump were not in the 2024 race. It’s just bad optics for any presidential candidate, let alone a highly unpopular one, to admit that they aren’t super excited about what they’re doing. Senator Rand Paul had a similar moment on the 2016 trail when he was asked if he was still running for president. His response? “I don’t know; I wouldn’t be doing this dumbass live streaming if I weren’t.” Hilarious, but doesn’t exactly strike confidence in the voting base.

“A hurt dog barks.” That’s what Tucker Carlson said as he aired various bits of the 41,000 hours of surveillance video captured at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. If you want to know what the hurt dog sounds like, just listen to Senator Chuck Schumer on March 7: “Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it.” Really, Chuck? Does “our democracy” depend on preventing the American people from seeing what really happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021?

As I have said before, I hope that the new Congress, which begins its session in just a couple of weeks, will continue the work of the January 6 Committee, minus Liz Cheney and the other kangaroos. The New York Times, in its best slant-the-news-while-appearing-magisterial modality, described the Committee’s 100-plus-page “Executive Summary” as a “report into the effort to overturn the 2020 election.” But surely the far greater attempt to impact the 2020 election was the FBI’s infiltration of Twitter and other social media platforms, Mark Zuckerberg’s half a billion dollars distributed like alms to NeverTrump sororities in battleground cities, etc., etc. All that should be the work of the new Congress. The old Congress wasn’t interested in the truth.

I take a page from history. On Thursday, the Committee (you know which one) voted 9-0 to subpoena the former president. Of course, he might refuse to comply with the subpoena. What then? Here’s one scenario, per CNN: "Contempt. The full House, which is controlled by Democrats until at least January, could vote to hold him in contempt of Congress, something it’s done with several other uncooperative witnesses "Referral. After a contempt of Congress referral, the Justice Department could then prosecute, as it did with Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon and plans to do with his once economic advisor Peter Navarro "Prosecution. If found guilty, as Bannon was, Trump could theoretically face a minimum of thirty days in jail.