0506blog
Who Do You Hate Today
It’s getting harder and harder to know what politicians to hate.
We place the bar so low, practically subterranean, to judge our politicians while we consistently re-write history to the point of pure fantasy. Former President George W. Bush should be pretty safe to hate because he lied through his teeth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and used the big lie as a justification to invade Iraq, one of the greatest debacles in American history. You would think that nobody could limbo under that bar but think again, Bush has been rehabilitated by many as a dignified leader, elder statesman and patriot, that is, in comparison with the man with the orange hair.
As president, Bush ignored intelligence warnings before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, then led the nation into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and his reckless policies helped lead to the nation’s worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. When he left office, 33 percent of Americans looked on him favorably but then along came Trump, and by 2018, the bar had dropped precipitously and 61 percent of Americans looked fondly upon Bush. What a difference a Trump makes.
One would think that Trump is easy to hate and he is but the Bone Spurs apologists are already rewriting the history of their fallen leader and when faced with the facts that he was impeached twice, his supporters say, “Yes, but he was never convicted.” There’s that pesky low bar again.
And now we come to Rep. Liz “Waterboarding Works” Cheney, R-Wyo., the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who served under George Bush. Liz Cheney is a conservative who supported most of Trump’s policies until he egged on his supporters to storm the Capitol and that is when the heroine, the gallant, Joan of Arc, Liz Cheney, refused to bow down to fealty and stood up in righteous indignation and voted to impeach Trump for fomenting the riot and then she stood, rock hard by her belief that Trump did not win the election.
Now in thanks for her incorruptibility, she is about to lose her post as the third most influential Republican in the House because she won’t play ball with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the rest of his gang of Trumpers.
Wow, that Cheney woman is gutsy, audacious, right up there with the defenders of the Alamo, and what an amazingly brave position for Cheney to take, it’s like those politicians who heroically opposed the holocaust. I like that Cheney is willing to sacrifice her political fortune and won’t prostrate herself before Trump, she is no knight in in shining armor.
There are a few minor points to make about her, starting with her 2009 refusal to denounce the birthers, led by Trump, who furthered the utterly nonsensical claim that Barack Obama was a Muslim and was unfit to be president. She has supported using waterboarding to torture suspected terrorists. And then there were those tapes that were released shortly before the 2016 election where Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. Cheney’s response was that Hillary Clinton’s handling of her emails was a worse offense.
A few other sides of Cheney. While campaigning for Trump in the 2020 campaign, she said Democrats were “the party of anti-Semitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism.” Just before the election, Cheney said that Kamala Harris sounded “like Karl Marx” because Harris pressed for more equitable treatment of needy Americans. She has opposed Biden’s American Rescue Plan and said it would “allow taxpayer money to fund abortion” and “provide stimulus checks for illegal immigrants, criminals and even terrorists.”
And who might replace Cheney as the third leading Republican. That would be Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., the generally unknown member of Congress who had previously been known as somewhat of a moderate, that is, until she jumped in full bore as a Trump supporter, and voted against impeaching Trump and said she would vote to invalidate the election.
After the attack on the Capitol, Stefanik said in a floor speech that alleged fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were enough to block Biden’s victory. And for her loyalty and devotion, she has won the support of the former, former president who wrote that “Elise is a tough and smart communicator!”
So I guess there’s a new person in town to hate, that is until she is knighted for taking a principled position that really isn’t very principled at all.