Tag Archives: Wyoming

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.

Does Sen. Barrasso Live on Brokeback Mountain?

Gay blogger Mark Rogers claims that ultra-conservative GOP Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming (where Brokeback Mountain is set) is also gay.  Rogers outs gay politicians whom he believes are hypocrites in their policy views and votes.

The Washington Post has called Rogers “the most feared man on [the] Hill” because of his accurate track record.

A Sense of Entitlement

I’ve been struck by Liz Cheney’s sense of entitlement to start her political career by running for the Senate without getting elected to any lower office first.

By contrast, Mike Enzi, the incumbent senator she is trying to oust, was a Wyoming mayor and a member of both the Wyoming House and the Wyoming Senate before moving up to the U. S. Senate.

Wyoming’s other senator, John Barrasso, was appointed to the Senate when Senator Craig Thomas died in 2007.  He then won a special election in 2008 and a full term in 2012.  But before his appointment to the U. S. Senate, he had served in the Wyoming Senate.

Her unwillingness to serve even briefly at the state level seems awfully presumptuous to me.

Cheney Run Based on Ageism

Wyoming Senate candidate Liz Cheney, 46, called her primary opponent, incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi, 69, “confused” twice in response to a question about his claim that she told him she wouldn’t challenge him if he ran for re-election.

She really can’t claim Enzi isn’t conservative, so she has to claim he’s too old.

I’m not sure this is a great strategy in a place like Wyoming where lots of people in their 70’s and 80’s still work hard every day on their farms and ranches.  And she comes across as unlikable to begin with…

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.