Loaded For Bear

If there is any doubt remaining that Trump, if he returns to power in January, will make opposition to him a capital offense, then Trump's latest outrage should sweep away all that.

In Arizona, he told Tucker Carlson in a public forum that Liz Cheney ought to be placed in front of a firing squad to see how she, who supported the wars in the Middle East in the 2000s and 2010s, would feel if she had nine rifles pointed at her face, ready to be fired.

That is, execution by firing squad.

Okay . . . Christian nationalism . . . one-party rule . . . monitoring pregnancies . . . and now firing squads as a form of capital punishment . . . I'm sorry, when did the entire country suddenly become like Utah??? 

Trump was particularly peeved at how Liz Cheney, like her father, could possibly support sending young men to war without ever having actually served in one.  If Trump wanted to highlight the fact that neither of the Cheneys never served in the military and  yet were "chicken hawks" who supported endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could have done it without threatening Liz with guns in her face.  Though, any criticism of the Cheneys as chicken hawks would have had much more resonance coming from a man who didn't claim to have bone spurs to avoid serving in Vietnam.

The Arizona Attorney General's office is investigating Trump's comments as a possible hate crime.    

Liz and Dick

I don't mean Taylor and Burton.

Former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney and her farther, former Vice President Dick Cheney, recently announced that they will be both be voting for Kamala Harris for President.  And to top that, Liz Cheney also said she is supporting Democratic U.S. Representative Colin Allred's campaign for the Senate against incumbent Ted Cruz in Texas. 

Having both represented all of Wyoming in the U.S. House, the Cheneys are among the most conservative politicians in recent history - some would call them reactionary - but one thing they agree with the Democrats on is that Donald Trump is a danger to a free, democratic representative government and that he must be stopped.  They're essentially giving Republicans a permission slip to vote for Harris.

I don't think that's going to be very successful.  Most Republicans have already left the party because of Trump. and those few remaining registered Republicans who oppose him are outnumbered by the new MAGA voters Trump brought in in 2016 and continues to bring in to this day.  As for Republican officeholders, they're too scared to speak out against Trump.  Half of them are afraid of losing their offices to the MAGA voters and the other half are afraid of losing their lives - to those same MAGA voters, who are likely uncowed by anti-lynching laws.  (They wanted to hang Mike Pence on January 6, 2021, remember.)   

In order to convince the few anti-Trump Republicans that remain to support Harris, the Cheneys have their work cut out for them.

Bye Bye Liz (Not?)

Two nights ago, Liz Cheney did something that everyone expected her to do.  She lost the Wyoming U.S. House primary. As her father might put it, big time.

Cheney lost to Trump-backed candidate Harriet Hageman by about 37 percentage points for the crime of telling the truth about Trump's insistence that he won the 2020 presidential election.  Most of the House Republicans who voted to impeach him for January 6 are already on their way out, but Liz Cheney's loss was like a cherry on the top of Trump's ice cream sundae, given her service on the January 6 select committee as its vice chair.

About two out of every three Republicans nominated for office this year are election deniers, people who believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate President.  As Trump might say, they're getting ready to win their elections in November, and frankly, many of them will win their elections.  They can't all lose, and those who win elections for secretary of state or governor in swing states could be the ones who help put Trump back into power in January 2025.    

Except for one thing: Liz Cheney plans to keep fighting Trump once her third and final term as Wyoming's at-large U.S. Representative is done.  In the meantime, she will continue to do her work on the January 6 select committee, and she plans to build up a political action committee as a private citizen.  She will continue to work tirelessly to make sure that Trump does not get back into the Presidency - and maybe even run for President herself in 2024 as a way of stopping him.

"We're facing a moment where our democracy really is under attack and under threat," Cheney said in an interview with CBS News. "And those of us across the board - Republicans, Democrats and independents who believe deeply in freedom and who care about the Constitution and the future of the country - have an obligation to put that above party."

She has her work cut out for her.  But she might actually pull it off. 

The January 6 Hearings - Part Eight

The public hearings of the U.S. House select committee investigating the January 6 attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election of 2020 are over until the fall, but they went out for the summer with a bang.

The committee, under the stewardship of Vice Chair Liz Cheney (Chairman Bennie Thompson came in remotely due to a COVID infection), illustrate how Donald Trump spent the three hours and change - 187 minutes to be exact - in which the insurrection at the Capitol took place.  He made no effort to contact the military or law enforcement even as is top advisers and even his daughter Ivanka urged him to call off his dogs.  The government officials who were trying to do just that were Senate leaders Charles Schumer and Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence.  Pence was closer to the insurrectionists seeking to make him the first Vice President to be assassinated than many people originally suspected, and  many agents protecting the Vice President were convinced they weren't going to get out alive.  Trump's two tweets during the insurrection only egged on the insurrectionists to do their worst.

Here's how afraid people are to testify against Trump: The agents protecting Pence testified anonymously.

I know it may be in bad taste to make light of that, but before the hearing, the committee reported that these agents would testify in disguise, which intrigued CNN anchor Jake Tapper.  I was hoping they'd testify in public, possible wearing ski masks, fake beards, or from behind a partition, but in fact they audio-recorded their testimonies in advance and their voices were distorted.  Mascot costumes would have been a neat way to disguise them for public testimony, or maybe painted clown faces, but you can't have everything.

Here's one funny detail: Although Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri expressed solidarity with the insurrectionists-to-be as he entered the Capitol to take part in the certification of the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election . . .

. . . he high-tailed it out of there when they came in with full guns a-blazin' - he was HAWLIN' ASS!

Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-far better . . ..  Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away! 😛

But even this wasn't as much of a hoot as the outtakes of Donald Trump trying to tape a statement the next day condemning the violence he encouraged without selling himself out - and refusing to say he lost the election.  Or the word "yesterday."  Man, that was more entertaining than finding the lost take of Bob Dylan singing "She's Your Lover Now" in its entirety!

Representative Cheney ended the hearing applauding the patriotism of Trump supporters but declaring that they'd been had by Trump, especially those of them who chose to take part in the insurrection.  She probably had as much luck reaching them as Abraham Lincoln had in his first inaugural address when he urged Southerners not to start a civil war.  But Cheney, wearing white in recognition of the women's suffrage movement of over a hundred years ago, also made it a point to thank the many women - may of them loyal to Trump who testified against him and helped set the record straight.

Hint: She wants to run for President.    

I know this is going to upset a lot of Democrats, but the woman who may finally break the mother of all glass ceilings - in addition to saving our democracy - may be a conservative Gen Xer from the West, and not a coastal bourgeois liberal Baby Boomer.  But she will be from a dynasty.

I can't wait to see what the committee has in store for September.

There's still one thing I don't get . . . Jared Kushner was in the shower?   

The January 6 Hearings - Part Seven

The latest public January 6 hearing was full of more incredible revelations, not the least of which was Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone walking into a rambunctious White House meeting on the plot to help keep Trump in power and wondering what the hell members of Trump's kitchen Cabinet - including the guy from Overstock.com - were doing there.  (At one point, the use of the military to seize voting machines was discussed.)  Just before the certification of the electoral vote in Congress, Trump loyalists openly discussed online the idea of committing bloodshed and murder against political enemies.  Stephen Ayres, the live witness with the Archie Andrews hair and the Dilton Doiley glasses, was very contrite in having gone to Washington on January 6 to take part in a demonstration only to get sucked up in the insurrection, and he apologized to Harry Dunn, a police officer who had been on duty that day.  (Officer Dunn still can't accept his apology.)

But none of this compares to Donald Trump encouraging supporters to come to Washington armed and dangerous and ensuring that the National Park Service, which takes care of the public space in the middle of town, would not learn of Trump's plans to send the MAGA mob to go to the Capitol.  It was not a spontaneous insurrection; it was carefully planned by a megalomaniac who couldn't accept the fact that he lost a presidential election and kept insisting that it was stolen.   

Liz Cheney said it best when she said that Trump, as a septuagenarian who is capable of understanding that he's not an impressionable child, he should have known better and accepted his loss.  Even Trump's 2016 campaign manager expressed regret for helping him defeat Hillary Clinton.  But something else Representative Cheney said was a signal to the Justice Department to go after Trump.  She revealed that a witness no one has heard from yet received a call from Trump and was pressured not to testify against him.  So, Trump committed the crime of witness tampering.     

If we don't stop Trump now, how will we be able to stop him later?

The January 6 Hearings - Part One

I think it's fair to say that the House January 6 select committee's televised hearings stormed out of the gate the other night. 

The committee showed new footage of the insurrection from that day, putting it into proper context and outlining a basic narrative that subsequent hearings will follow.  In addition, ranking Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming laid out a blunt, outlined seven-point plan Trump had to keep the Presidency despite his loss to Joe Biden.  It reads as follows:

• President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.
• President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Acting Attorney General, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.
• President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.
• President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.
• President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.
• President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.
• As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.

The facts as Cheney and Democratic Chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi presented them certainly ft this narrative like a velvet glove.  And then came the iron fists: Former Attorney General William Barr insists that Trump lost the election fair and square, and Ivanka Trump, Donald's pseudo-attractive daughter, agrees with Barr!

Fleshing all of this out was testimony from Capitol Policewoman Caroline Edwards, who recalled the violence at the insurrection and explained how she was pushed back with brute force and blacked out momentarily before resuming her efforts to hold back the mob.  Even more devastating was the testimony from British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was making a film about the polarization of American politics and filming leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers involved plotting the takeover of the Capitol - on the night of January 5! - thus belying the idea that this "demonstration" was "spontaneous." 

The best is yet to come.  Over the course of more televised hearings this month, the January 6 committee will offer greater details of how that day played out - the better to place the blame for the insurrection squarely on Trump.  Republicans - and Trump - are already calling this a partisan witch hunt, insisting that it's better to investigate the root causes of January 6 by looking into electoral irregularities involving vote-by-mail practices as a result of the pandemic - irregularities  that didn't exist - and questions into Speaker Pelosi's role in beefing up security for the electoral vote count.  Liz Cheney, for one, isn't having any of that.  As she said the other night at the first hearing, when she said her fellow Republicans were "defending the indefensible":

"There will come a day when Donald Trump will be gone. But your dishonor will remain."

Will any of this matter? We'll see.

Liz In 2024?

Could the first female President of the United States be a Republican?

Liz Cheney has been getting a large number of donations from leading Republican bigwigs who despise the GOP's biggest wig (or hair weave) of them all, Donald J. Trump.  Her steadfast defense of the rule of law and her tenacity on the January 6 House select committee have gotten noticed by Republicans who want to keep Wyoming's only House seat in their camp and not surrender it to a Trump supporter.  So they're sending Liz cash and checks faster than you can say "Lincoln Project."  If she survives the Wyoming Republican U.S. House primary - which in the Equality State is tantamount to winning the general election - she could become a (the?) front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination among anti-Trumpers in 2024.  This could make Cheney, not a Democrat, this country's first female President, as well as the first Wyoming resident and the first Generation Xer to win the White House.

In no way am I suggesting that I would be happy with a President Liz Cheney.  She's still her daddy's girl, which means she's still a right-winger.  And she voted with Trump 98 percent of the time between 2017 and 2021.  But she's also voted with the Constitution 100 percent of the time, and at a time when it looks like President Biden is damaged goods for 2024 and Cheney may be the best chance to stop a Trump restoration, that is more important.

If Biden ends up not running for re-election in 2024, though, I'd like to see Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar get the Democratic presidential nomination next time.  How about that? A Klobuchar-Cheney presidential contest? That's an election campaign I'd like to comment on.   

Sing a Song of Pence

Mike Pence just took a stand.

The former Vice President spoke at a meeting of the Federalist Society saying that Donald Trump was wrong when he said that the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which Congress is trying to amend to make its intent clearer, gave him the right to decide who won the 2020 election.  

Trump pretty much admitted to the coup attempt in 2020 and 2021 in a statement defending his novel interpretation of the Electoral Count Act.    "What they are saying," Trump said in reference to attempt so reword that law,  "is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away.  Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the election!"

Pence made it clear that the opposite is true.  "Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election," he said, and he added that Vice President Kamala Harris will have no right to do so in January 2025. 

"Frankly," he added, "there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American President."

Meanwhile, the Electoral Count Act should be tidied up to make sure that a future Vice President will never again be put in the position that Pence was in - not to mention the fact the he came being close to being lynched.  Congress is working on that.  But it still may be possible for Republican operatives in various states to rig the electoral votes that reach Washington in the 2024 election to make sure that Trump - or Ron DeSantis or some other Mussolini wannabe - gets installed into the Presidency over the will of the voters.  We're still at risk of becoming a kleptocratic fascist dictatorship. 

A fascist dictatorship governed by a party that sanctifies violence as "legitimate political discourse" . . . something so sacred to today's GOP that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are censured by the party for even investigating it. 

Liz

I have one thing to say about Liz Cheney.

I like her.

Oh, sure, she's a right-wing nut, but I like her.  Anyone who stands up to Trump and vows to make sure he doesn't pull a Grover Cleveland and return to the White House in January 2025 gets my vote - or would, if I lived in Wyoming.  She's all right with me.

Why not?  She knows Trump lied about winning the 2020 presidential election and having it stolen from him, and she knows he's going to keep lying about it and get his supporters to remain faithful to him to the point where Republican officeholders will do his bidding.  He is eager and ready to get back into the White House, trash the system all over again, turn the Democratic Party into a permanent minority opposition, and turn Congress into a rubber-stamp legislature to allow him to run roughshod over the Constitution.  And from there it will be one simple step to some form of apartheid to keep people of color - soon to be the majority of Americans - in line.  All while Trump uses his power to enrich himself further and bend the law to his favor.

And I don't know how Liz Cheney is going to stop all that by continuing to speak out against Trump after having been expelled for her House Republican leadership position yesterday.  But I'll sure be happy to see her try.  

Trial By Fire

I got lost trying to follow the various stories this past week about health care reform, Eric Massa, and the like, but one story this week that did get my attention was Liz Cheney's attempt to impugn the integrity of seven unnamed Justice Department lawyers representing al-Qaeda suspects. The former Vice President's dumber daughter suggested that the mere idea of these lawyers representing these terror suspects amounted to lack of patriotism and even treason. The Cheneys may have gone too far - may have? no, did! - this time. The fiercest critics of Liz Cheney and her McCarthyism-style tactics were conservative lawyers, saying that Liz's interpretation of the Constitution - enemy combatants are not entitled to fair trials - make a mockery of the fairness this country's system of laws strives for.

You know you've crossed the line as a conservative when even Michael Mukasey (George Walker Bush's last Attorney General) and Ken Starr speak out against you.

Upholding the rights of odious defendants in criminal trials is a time-honored American tradition that dates back to before the founding of the nation. John Adams famously defended the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, and even Nazi war criminals received trials at Nuremberg. For Liz Cheney to suggest that al-Qaeda defendants are not deserving of a fair trial simply because we don't like these people is more un-American than she thinks the acts of their lawyers are.

Listening to Liz Cheney speak after having listened to her father for too long, it's obvious that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. In fact, the apple is still on the tree.