Liz Cheney is a lot of fun. Really, no joke.
She can drone on in a Hillary Clinton-like monotone voice without the cackle, and almost make you believe she is above all the political cheap shots that are so popular today. However, when you get down to it, she just does not have the charm of others who do the same thing.
Maybe she could take some “how-to be exciting” lessons from her Dad.
Representative Cheney might feel like she gets picked on for her “rational” take on things, but she is just doing the political ax-grinding that all politicians do. I covered her decision to not run for re-election (in my opinion) when I wrote this a couple of weeks back: Liz Cheney Makes It Official: With Her Latest Move She Is NOT Running for Reelection.
From that article…
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will give an opening statement at Tuesday’s first hearing by the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, underscoring how Democrats want to present the proceedings as bipartisan despite the boycott by House GOP leaders.
Cheney’s opening statement will follow one from the select committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), according to a source familiar with the plan.
The select committee’s first hearing on Tuesday will feature testimony from four police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6: Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell of the Capitol Police, as well as Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Capitol Police.
Cheney compromised her political soul to be one of the Republican poster children for the Jan 6th Capitol Riot hearings put on by Nancy Pelosi. The reasoning given for this is that she was so distraught over Donald Trump giving orders for his supporters to storm the Capitol that any commission needed to be formed to look into it. Even a political dog and pony show put on by Madame Speaker that Cheney knows is not about fact-finding but ax-grinding.
Cheney can not herself show where Trump or anyone else incited a riot and her attempts to articulate that point have been non-inspiring. Adding insult to injury to her shrinking credibility were the reports last week that the FBI could not find any “plot” to overthrow the government or even to riot on Jan 6th HUGE: FBI Investigation Just Blew Up the Dem Narrative about the Capitol Riot. From my colleague Nick Arama’s article…
According to four current and former law enforcement officials, the FBI has “found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.” The FBI doesn’t believe that the riot was “centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.”
The FBI investigators found that while some of the people might have wanted to break into the Capitol, there was “no evidence” that they had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside. This is why they didn’t file any sedition charges. Oh. So the folks who argue that this was about overthrowing the government folks also get dealt a huge blow with this.
So in essence, we are talking about what we’ve always been talking about here – a riot. BLM/Antifa rioted/attacked the Portland federal court house for more than 100 days, coming out with the same people. Yet their pictures aren’t posted to be investigated on their own page, most weren’t held and none of those leaders appears to have been identified or even pursued, despite the obvious organizing of it all over more than a year.
I feel bad for Liz that all her emoting on this issue is now blowing up on her. Ok, I lied, I actually don’t. If a politician like Liz Cheney can stand in front of T.V. cameras and lie about the meaning of words I should be allowed to also on occasion for articles like this.
Seems fair.
One last point on saying things just to say things regardless of what they mean.
The United States is currently fixated on the absolutely asinine way that Joe Biden has demanded our military to pull out of Afghanistan. Cheney, who has argued unsuccessfully for years we should never leave, has taken this opportunity to take a breather on ripping on Trump and ding the Biden Administration for this debacle. She appeared on Fox News yesterday with Neal Cavuto to say this about how this has been handled early in the interview.
Secondly, you know, this — none of this had to happen, Neil. We had 2,500 forces on the ground maintaining a counterintelligence presence, maintaining a counterterrorism presence. The Afghan forces were bearing the brunt of the fight. We were working with them and we were preventing the Taliban from gaining an entire country as a sanctuary from which their allies — Al Qaeda, the other terrorist organizations, like ISIS-K, the Haqqani Network which now seems to be responsible for security in Kabul — all of those terrorist organizations which want to attack the United States now have an entire country as a sanctuary, thanks to this withdrawal that we’ve seen President Biden order.
Neal followed up with this question and Liz fell right back into her tired trope of blaming Trump for everything.
Cavuto: What did you make of the president’s claim that this was something that he inherited?
Cheney: Look I was clear at the time I think that President Trump and Secretary Pompeo’s determination to negotiate with the Taliban was a huge mistake and the document they signed was a surrender agreement.
So the 2,500 troops that were still in-country and offering air support for the Afghan army and holding the Taliban at bay was the result of a surrender agreement? Cheney was defending the force before Cavuto gave her some Trump chum and she reacted exactly the way Neal was thinking she would. I don’t know how we are supposed to take anyone seriously that in the course of 10 minutes can shift like this based on their feelings about an individual.
You can argue that the force needed to be bigger or smaller but to say that the agreement that Trump left Biden is at least somewhat sufficient one moment and then a surrender agreement the next moment defies common sense.
You can say that the riot on Jan 6th at the Capitol was bad (which it was) but misusing words like insurrection and blaming it on a speech that never told anyone to riot is irresponsible.
Liz Cheney needs to use a more common-sense approach to how she frames her arguments and a good place to start would be to learn the meaning of the words she chooses to use. I don’t have much hope she will do this though.
Her future gig at CNN awaiting her after she leaves office does not require the words you use to be accurate.
