Tag Archives: Liz Cheney

Voter Fraud Does Exist — In the Cheney Family

You know how the GOP has been passing restrictive Voter ID laws to suppress the vote of “those people” in the guise of fighting non-existent voter fraud?

Well, it turns out voter fraud does exist — in Liz Cheney’s house.  Liz (daughter of Dick, in more ways than one) is running for Senate in her “home” (of five minutes) state of Wyoming against GOP incumbent Mike Enzi.  But her husband Phil Perry, who is an attorney at the prestigious Latham & Watkins firm, has been registered to vote in both Virginia and Wyoming since last March.  When Perry registered in Wyoming, he signed an oath that he wasn’t registered in another state.

Can’t wait to hear how they ‘splain spin this.

The Mess We Left Behind

As we focus on Syria and Egypt and Afghanistan, let’s not forget the mess we left behind in Iraq, where Sunni-Shiite violence just gets more intense.

There have been almost 3,000 deaths from sectarian attacks this year, with more than 500 so far this month.  This weekend, car bombs in Baghdad have killed almost 40 people.

Not to mention the rapprochement between Iraq and Iran that we created, which is a strategic disaster for us.

I hope that as Bush 43 assumes more of a public profile again, and as Dick Cheney campaigns for his daughter Liz in Wyoming, they will get asked, “WTF?”

Interesting Take on Liz Cheney

From “Why Republicans Are So Annoyed by The Liz Cheney Candidacy,” Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo:

“Here’s why I’m experiencing a little schadenfreude over the news that Liz Cheney’s gonna run for Senate. And it has almost nothing to do with her dad, or the possibility that she’ll win her primary and give Democrats an opening to run nationwide against the return of Cheney.

“Liz Cheney is the über-Republican. She personifies the fusionist nature of her party better than anyone I can think of. She spouts the kind of extreme rhetoric you might expect to hear from paranoid, socially conservative base voters and certain back-bench members of the House GOP, but her politics are textbook Beltway hawkish conservatism — axe social insurance programs, cut taxes, deregulate industries, swagger in foreign affairs, etc.

“The standard-bearers of that latter ethos often try to dissociate themselves and the national party from figures like Michele Bachmann and Steve King — people whose differences with the pro-donor wing of the party are both rhetorical and substantive.

“The party’s differences with Liz Cheney, by contrast, are purely stylistic. Senator Cheney probably wouldn’t spend too much of her time trying to de-fluoridate the water supply, and would be a great ally to the conservative economic and fiscal mainstream. She’d actually be a triumph of political engineering if there were a huge constituency for draping policies that benefit the rich in déclassé rhetorical extremism. But that constituency is very small and unpopular, almost by definition. And simply by engaging in a particular approach to politics the party wants to inch away from — slowly, gently, without alienating its base — she’ll make the task of dialing it down a notch very difficult.

“Which is a big reason, I think, why professional Republicans are scared of her candidacy.”

I kind of look at her from the other side of the coin, that she speaks to both the  Sarah Palin crowd and the Paul Ryan/John Bolton crowd.  The more educated wing of the party thinks she’s spouting all that “base” rhetoric to attract the ignorant, pretending to be Main Street when she’s really McLean, while the ignorant think she’s one of them.  It could be a powerful and successful combination, a much bigger constituency than Beutler seems to believe.  But she’s pissing off a lot of people in Wyoming who think she’s unfairly going after Enzi’s seat.

This Should Be Interesting

Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz has announced that she’s running for Senate from Wyoming, having moved to the state ages ago last year.

She’ll challenge incumbent Mike Enzi in a primary next summer, but despite the fact that Enzi and Cheney pere are old friends, Liz didn’t give Enzi a heads-up, kind of like when Rudy Giuliani told his wife he was divorcing her at a press conference.

Enzi’s reaction?  “She said that if I ran, she wasn’t going to run, but obviously that wasn’t correct.  I thought we were friends.”

If you’ve ever seen Liz on Fox, where she lies her tush off about President Obama, you won’t be surprised that not only did she lie to Enzi, she didn’t even have the decency to tell him first.

And From the Parallel Universe…

I didn’t want to read Liz Cheney’s op-ed* in the WSJ, but I forced myself to.  Get yourself a piece of chocolate and check out these excerpts:

“President Obama is the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

“The president has launched a war on Americans’ Second Amendment rights.  He has launched a war on religious freedom  He has launched a war on fossil fuels.

“The president has so effectively diminished American strength abroad that there is no longer a question of whether this was his intent.  He is working to pre-emptively disarm the United States.”

 

* “Republicans, Get Over the 2012 Loss — and Start Fighting Back”

 

 

Mitt’s Foreign Policy Is As Dumb And Dangerous As Bush’s

Thomas Friedman slams Mitt’s shallow and simplistic foreign policy speech.  From “What Romney Didn’t Say,” NYT:

“Mitt Romney gave a foreign policy speech on Monday that could be boiled down to one argument: everything wrong with the Middle East today can be traced to a lack of leadership by President Obama. If this speech is any indication of the quality of Romney’s thinking on foreign policy, then we should worry. It was not sophisticated in describing the complex aspirations of the people of the Middle East. It was not accurate in describing what Obama has done or honest about the prior positions Romney has articulated. And it was not compelling or imaginative in terms of the strategic alternatives it offered. The worst message we can send right now to Middle Easterners is that their future is all bound up in what we do. It is not. The Arab-Muslim world has rarely been more complicated and more in need of radical new approaches by us — and them.

Look at the real trends in the region. In Iraq and Afghanistan, sadly, autocracy has not been replaced with democracy, but with “elective kleptocracy.” Elective kleptocracy is what you get when you replace an autocracy with an elected government before there are accountable institutions and transparency, while huge piles of money beckon — in Iraq thanks to oil exports, and in Afghanistan thanks to foreign aid.

Meanwhile, in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq and Libya, we have also seen the collapse of the “Mukhabarat states” — Mukhabarat is Arabic for internal security services — but not yet the rise of effective democracies, with their own security organs governed by the rule of law. As we saw in Libya, this gap is creating openings for jihadists.

At the same time, the civil war between Sunni Muslims, led by the Saudis, and Shiite Muslims, led by Iran, is blazing as hot as ever and lies at the heart of the civil war in Syria. In addition, we also have a struggle within Sunni Islam between puritanical Salafists and more traditional Muslim Brotherhood activists. And then there is the struggle between all of these Islamist parties — who argue that “Islam is the answer” for development — and the more secular mainstream forces, who may constitute the majority in most Mideast societies but are disorganized and divided.

How does the U.S. impact a region with so many cross-cutting conflicts and agendas? We start by making clear that the new Arab governments are free to choose any path they desire, but we will only support those who agree that the countries that thrive today: 1) educate their people up to the most modern standards; 2) empower their women; 3) embrace religious pluralism; 4) have multiple parties, regular elections and a free press; 5) maintain their treaty commitments; and 6) control their violent extremists with security forces governed by the rule of law.

But when we’re talking to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the new government in Libya, we cannot let them come to us and say: “We need money, but right now our politics is not right for us to do certain things. Give us a pass.” We bought that line for 50 years from their dictators. It didn’t end well. We need to stick to our principles.  Emphasis added; italics in original.

Mitt’s foreign policy speech is one more reason why I’m voting for Obama no matter what, even if he spends the next two debates singing the theme song from “Sesame Street.”  Mitt, like Bush 43, lacks not only a background in foreign policy, but also any interest in it.  He’d just be led by the nose by the neo-cons on his team.  He’s got Liz Cheney now!  If she wants to shoot her ignorant mouth off on Fox, that’s fine, but I don’t want her anywhere near actual policy-making authority.

Free Speech Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

From Bill Maher’s column, “Please Stop Apologizing,” NYT:

“If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life.  Turn the page or flip the dial or pick up your roll of quarters and leave the booth.

“For example I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I’ve been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method:  I never listen to his program.  The only time I hear him is when I’m at a stop light next to a pickup truck.

“If we sand down our rough edges and drain all the color, emotion and spontaneity out of our discourse, we’ll end up with political candidates who never say anything but the safest, blandest, emptiest, most unctuous focus-grouped platitudes and cant.  In other words, we’ll get Mitt Romney.”

Unctuous!  That’s the word that’s been eluding me to describe Mitt.

I agree we should be tolerant of each other, but, people, can’t we all agree that mimes are really annoying?

I would also add using the fast-forward button on the remote.  I force myself to watch Sean Hannity to keep up with what he’s saying against President Obama.  But last night, he had Ann Coulter, followed by Michelle Malkin, followed by Liz Cheney.  Way too much self-righteous crazy for me from three extremely unattractive media whores, who claim to love their country, but really just love attention.  I zipped through that show in a couple of minutes.  But if others enjoy spending an hour of their lives that they’ll never get back listening to those three cackle and stir up their brew, knock yourselves out.

Note to Coulter — the hair extensions only draw more attention to your Adam’s apple.