In article <suk3a4$1ckan$31@news.freedyn.de>
<governor.swill@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is what happens to bitchy fat broads who stab honest men in the back.
>

As she positions for a presidential bid, the defeated
representative imagines herself as Lincolnesque. That�s absurd.

iz Cheney wanted to prove that the Republican Party was not a
wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump.

She failed. Miserably.

The three-term US representative from Wyoming didn�t just lose
her reelection bid in that state�s Republican primary on
Tuesday; she was wiped out. In the state that has long served as
a political launchpad for the national ambitions of the Cheney
family, Liz Cheney won less than 29 percent of the vote, as
opposed to the more than 66 percent that went to challenger
Harriet Hageman. Cheney lost all but two of Wyoming�s 23
counties�Albany, the home of liberal Laramie and the University
of Wyoming, and Teton, the wealthy ski-resort enclave that has
long been the most Democratic County in one of the nation�s most
Republican states.

Cheney never really had a chance. After she broke with Trump,
the former president who has made himself the undisputed boss of
the Grand Old Party, she was doomed to defeat in a Republican
primary where her last best hope was a massive Democratic
crossover vote that still would not have been enough to save
her. Even if every Democrat and Democratic-leaning independent
in the state had voted for Cheney, she would have lost because
she was so incredibly unpopular with the Republican base.

So, in this moment of complete and utter rejection by the
Republicans who know her best, Cheney is busy making her next
political move. And it�s a big one.

On the morning after her crushing defeat, the soon-to-be former
congresswoman went on NBC�s Today show and signaled that she is
interested in bidding for the presidency in 2024. �It is
something that I am thinking about, and I�ll make a decision in
the coming months,� said Cheney, who on Wednesday announced the
formation of a new group that could serve as a base for a
presidential run.

The group will have plenty of money. Instead of going all in as
a Wyoming primary candidate, Cheney banked a lot of the money
she collected from donors across the country. Her last pre-
primary campaign finance report showed that she had spent only
half of the more than $15 million she raised for the
congressional race.

Cheney, an ambitious and calculating politician, will keep right
on raising money to keep herself in contention. But for what?
Her presidential prospects would appear to be no better than
those of her father, Dick, who before installing himself as vice
president mounted a failed bid for the 1996 Republican
presidential nomination. So there�s a creeping suspicion that
all the post-primary positioning could be more about promoting
Liz Cheney�s brand than her stated goal of �doing whatever it
takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.�

The notion that Cheney would be a serious contender for the
Republican nomination in a challenge to Trump�s all-but-certain
2024 bid is comic. The Grand Old Party is now Trump�s political
plaything. Of the almost 200 candidates he has endorsed in 2022
Republican primaries, 182 have won and just 15 have lost. Cheney
is the fourth House Republican who voted for Trump�s impeachment
to be defeated in a GOP primary, and four others decided to drop
their reelection plans rather than face a Trump-backed
challenger.

The likelier route for Cheney is as an independent, or as the
leader of a new party that would try to attract disaffected
Republicans, as well as independents and Democrats who have been
impressed with the representative�s fierce opposition to Trump.

That�s comparable to what Abraham Lincoln did in 1860, when he
and his allies pulled former Whigs, Free Soil land reformers,
dissident Democrats, and abolitionists together in a Republican
Party that won an election where four major candidates split the
presidential vote. Cheney would very much like to be considered
the Lincoln of her time.

�The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln,
was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he
won the most important election of all,� Cheney said after
suffering her own defeat. �Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he
saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for
all of history.�

In case anyone missed the connection she was trying to make,
Cheney added:

Speaking at Gettysburg of the great task remaining before us,
Lincoln said that, �We here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a
new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the
people, and for the people, shall not perish from this earth.�
As we meet here tonight, that remains our greatest and most
important task.

The reference to �the great task� was a marketing move. Within
hours of referencing Lincoln�s 1863 reflection on winning the
Civil War as �the great task remaining before us,� Cheney�s
political team announced that the new group that will serve as
her springboard for future fundraising and campaigns will be
called The Great Task.

Cheney egos are every bit as big as Trump egos. Don�t doubt for
a moment that Liz Cheney does, indeed, see herself as similar to
the 16th president.

But she�s not, personally or politically. And the notion that
Cheney might form a new party with appeal to moderate
Democrats�or even moderate Republicans�is absurd.

While her work on the House Select Committee to Investigate the
January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has been exemplary,
Cheney�s record is that of an extreme right-wing advocate for
positions that have mirrored those of Trump when it comes to
attacking immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and Democrats. Before
her split with the 45th president, she voted with him 93 percent
of the time. And she has an ugly history of exploiting political
divisions by promoting Big Lies, as Cheney did when she refused
to reject Trump�s vile �birther� lies about former President
Barack Obama, and when she claimed that Vice President Kamala
Harris �sounds just like Karl Marx.�

Lincoln, like other early Republicans, read Marx, who was the
European correspondent for Horace Greeley�s New York Tribune,
the newspaper that played a critical role in calling the party
into being. Indeed, a number of Marx�s German followers were
among the great many immigrants and refugees who helped to forge
a Republican Party that opposed the spread of slavery, promoted
worker rights, and implemented land reforms that were aimed at
alleviating poverty. When the Republican Party was founded in
Ripon, Wis., in 1854, a number of the people in the room were
members of the socialist Ceresco commune.

Lincoln was not as militant as the Radical Republicans who
supported him. But he was no conservative. Raised in a working-
class family on the frontier, he had nothing to do with the sort
of dynastic politics in which Liz Cheney was raised. Lincoln was
a circuit-riding country lawyer who won his campaign for the
state legislature as a champion of workers and farmers. Liz
Cheney came to prominence as a defender of the Iraq War that was
launched based on her father�s lies, and as a champion of the
sort of empire-building military interventionism that Lincoln
opposed as one of the US House�s most ardent critics of the 1846
US invasion of Mexico. Lincoln took inspiration from the anti-
colonial pamphlets of Thomas Paine. Cheney perfected her
rhetorical skills as a Fox News regular who defended the use of
torture.

No matter how hard Liz Cheney wants voters to think of her as a
new-model Lincoln, the reality is that she�s just a slightly
refurbished Cheney.

<https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/cheney-no-lincoln/>