By Stephen Macaulay
There are two ways that Liz Cheney seems to be perceived nowadays. One is that she is something of a Joan of Arc, an inspired individual taking on the Forces of Darkness.
The other is that she is the spawn of a Force of Darkness (i.e., her dad).
But I have another point of view on the evidently feisty representative from Wyoming: she is a Conversative Republican.
In her May 5th op-ed in The Washington Post Cheney wrote “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”
That “turning point” phrase got people on the Left a strong case of the vapors of delight. “Oh, my,” they said, “she realizes that the Party has to turn away from Trump.” The excitement on MSNBC was evident.
Then the final clause, “whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution” added a large measure of legitimacy: People don’t pull out the Constitution unless they really want to make a point. And the fact that she said “choose truth” is an absolute contrast to the man who spent the past several years complaining about it while creating “fake news,” the man who is responsible for the “Big Lie” that Cheney is forthrightly opposed to.
But there is another part of her essay that hasn’t gotten the amount of attention that it deserves: “There is much at stake now, including the ridiculous wokeness of our political rivals, the irrational policies at the border and runaway spending that threatens a return to the catastrophic inflation of the 1970s.”
Liz Cheney is not some sort of acolyte of Nancy Pelosi. She has a conservative Republican agenda and she will do her damnedest to pursue it.
The thing is, Cheney is a normal person. Normal to the extent that she knows right from wrong. You’d think that such a capability isn’t even table stakes, but given the fact that all but a handful of other people in the Republican party have a shown a bizarre resistance to acknowledging not just what they saw on a screen but actually were part of, the Storming of the Capitol by a Mob Whose Goal Was to Prevent the Certification of the 2020 Presidential Election — somehow by exhibiting what we would expect from elementary school children, the willingness to admit the truth -- she has been derided by some and seemingly sanctified by others.
Don’t get me wrong. I am glad she has and will continue to speak up about the travesty that is the continued lying by Donald Trump and his willing minions. (This brings to mind something that is really quite disturbing about some of them, especially the Republican politicians who had been in the 2016 primaries against him — yes, you, Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham — who now not only carry his water but feed it to him in a golden teaspoon: They are shamelessly supporting him because they are afraid of losing their jobs. Pathetic.)
Liz Cheney is a conservative Republican. A proud one. Good for her. She stands for principles. There can be an argument about the validity of those principles, but she has them. She stands for truth. And no matter how many ways her detractors try to spin it, A is A: We saw what happened; we heard what Trump said.
So why is this in the Left column on this page? Because I think liberals are happy to engage with reasoned principled people. Those who willingly ignore reality and who spin fanciful conspiracy theories and lie one day and admit the next that what they said perhaps wasn’t true but it doesn’t matter — well that’s not someone whom you can actually compete with in any but a primitive way and we should be out of the gutter.