All Hail Liz Cheney...

...is the title of a podcast I will be reviewing today.  

It's from those kooky kidz over at The Bulwark, and I patiently skimmed the "All Hail Liz Cheney" podcast (with MSNBC regular Tim Miller, and MSNBC regular Sarah Longwell, and Jonathan Last) waiting for what I knew would inevitably be there.  

Twas as if I were at a familiar fishing hole at dawn. It's cool. There's a little rain.  You know they'll practically jump into your net. All you have to do is put a line in the water and wait a few minutes..

First came the lavish praising of Liz Cheney.  She wrote a book!  Which is apparently a great thing because it "exposes" stuff.  Just like Mitt Romney's book.  And Adam  Kinzinger's book. And the other +2000 books about Trump.  

But of course they're not really "exposing" anything, are they?

ex·pose

/ikˈspōz/

verb

1. make (something) visible by uncovering it.

"at low tide the sands are exposed"

2. reveal the true, objectionable nature of (someone or something). "he has been exposed as a liar and a traitor"

(Kind of a cheat to use the word "reveal" to define the word "expose" since they mean virtually the same thing -- 

re·veal 

/rəˈvēl/

verb  

make (previously unknown or secret information) known to others. "Brenda was forced to reveal Robbie's whereabouts"

-- but whatever.)

Anyway, nothing mind-changing or soul-shifting is being revealed or expose in these books because, after all this time, who is there left to persuade one way or another?  

Nobody.  It's all trench warfare now.  A "game of inches" as the sports people say.

If you want to add one more books to the mile-hile pile of Trump books that have already been published because you have some fantasy that someday, some historian is going to paw through the billions of words written about Trump and the Republican party, find your particular book, crack it, read it, and say "Aha!  Now I get it!"...well, OK.  Great.

And of your pals at the Recently Former Republicans media corporation want to pimp your book, well that's fine too.  

But just between you and me and George Soros, everyone knows that there's nothing anyone can write -- no series of words, no matter how cunningly constructed -- that is gonna make anyone who is still a Republican jump the fence.  Or any committed Both Siderist climb down off that fence. Or open the eyes of any Liberal any wider about all the shit we already knew about the Republican party decades  ago.  

So all of that just breezed past me.  Don't care.  Don't care.  Don't care.  Well, 90% "don't care" and the other 10% is a kind of pity I guess.  After all, these people have had their noses rubbed in the reality that virtually every Conservative they have ever trusted, virtually every Republican political client they have ever worked for and pretty much all of their professional colleagues and friends...are scum.  Unprincipled cowards and grifters at best.  At worst, outright fascists.  And the base of the Party of Reagan?  A shitpile of bigots and imbeciles.

In other words, pretty much everything we Progressives had been warning them about all along.  

And they're all trying to find a way to square that with their own self-images as savvy, smart, insightful political professionals.  They want to mount a righteous high horse and scowl down at the ruins of their recently former party and shout "We told you so!  We warned you!" while at the same time retaining their contempt for us Progressives who have been shouting "We warned you!  We told you so!" at them for decades.

So if you do nothing more than wait at that fishing hole for not-very-long, eventually they'll get around to shitting on Progressives.

And thus it was that after all the lavish talk that medals be struck and paeans be penned and statues be raised to Liz Cheney in every Middlesex village and farm, Sarah Longwell took time to gripe about "Progressives" in the most Never Trump imaginable:  by calling out a specific Progressive by name and then very carefully skipping right over the actual issue that person raises.

Sara Longwell:  The question is, what does Liz Cheney do next? What... how does she try and defeat Donald Trump?   And I thing I... One of the things that's really complicated aout this moment is... Tim was talking about the Progressives who still kind of hold it against her.  Like Don Winslow or somebody, who just, like, re--lent--lessly pumping out stuff like, here's what she said about abortion and here's what she said about this.  And what's disappointing or, uh, um, I don't kinda know what to do with is what...what is the role of Liz Cheney next.  

This right here is absolutely Bulwark in-house policy.  I've heard many of them do it.  Hand-wave away what Liz Cheney said about Democrats and abortion without ever actually addressing what Cheney actually said.  Instead, it's airily dismissed as a mere difference of opinion, and then on to the ritual Slagging of the Liberals for not getting with the program and joining the Liz Cheney for Sainthood parade.

What the fuck is wrong with us that, for the greater good, we can't get past a little disagreement over policy?

This is  MSNBC contributor Tim Miller in conversation with Bulwark co-owner and fellow MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes more than a year ago on a different Bulwark podcast as documented by me because, as I said, the Slag the Liberals fish are always jumpin' down at the Bulwark:

Sykes:  Let's flip the card a little bit though.  How do you explain the psychology of -- and you... you... you... alluded to this -- the psychology Progressives activists including people like Don Winslow, who's a filmmaker, y'know, and, like, anti-Trump Progressive novelist and everything.  Y'know, big Twitter guy who is obsessively -- I mean obsessively -- attacking, right now, Liz Cheney.  It's like this is the moment when Democrats are facing a wipeout in the midterms... 

driftglass: What the hell does how the Dems may or may not do in the midterms have to do with Liz Cheney?

Sykes:  ... when we are facing this existential challenge of the coup... at this moment they've decided... 

driftglass:  "they've" decided?  Who is "they"?  Because the only person Sykes has mentioned is Don Winslow?

Sykes continues:  "No, we can't like Liz Cheney because, y'know, she's a Conservative Republican and pro-lifer and therefore we gotta make sure we tell all Progressives ...

driftglass:  "we gotta make sure we tell all Progressives"?  Who is "we"?  Because, once again, the only person Sykes has mentioned is Don Winslow? 

Sykes continues: ....don't give any credit to these folks who have thrown themselves on the grenade to protect democracy because X, Y, Z."

driftglass:   "these folks"?  Who are "these folks"? Because the only "folks" Sykes has mentioned is Liz Cheney?  Also more about this "X,Y,Z" bullshit at the bottom of this post.

Miller continues:  And... and... and the coalitions on the Left and on the Right.  There are more antibodies on the Left to the crazy and the rage.  That doesn't mean that there aren't also parallels...

driftglass: And then , after all the assurances that this is not an attempt to draw an equivalence, comes the equivalence.

Miller:  And what I write about in the backwards section of the book -- where I write about my complicity is working with Conservative media types -- is [long pause] this addiction.  To the rage juice.  Right?  This addiction to the daily outrage.  Where you are made to feel like you are good and your other... your fellow Americans as made to be seen as evil.

driftglass:  Let us pause to reflect on the fact that Tim Miller is whining about the insidious effects to the Outrage Media...on a media site that routinely carps about the Republican base being deranged, and 96% of Republican leadership as being either outright fascist or cowards or amoral opportunists willing to ally with fascist to advance their careers.

Miller:  And people like Don...and other Resistance media types...

Sykes [barely audible]:  This is so good.

driftglass:  Here comes another shot at fence straddling  

Miller: I do think there is a big difference between Left media and the Right media...

driftglass:   Golly, thanks Tim.

Miller: ...and there are some Left media who are being good and, y'know, are praising Liz Cheney, so it's not uniform like it is on the Right media.  

Translation:  I hope you don't think I'm talking about you guys on MSNBC. You guys are the best!  No, we're talking about all those other Progressive media outfits.  The ones who are naughty bad and don't have half the staff we have here at The Bulwark on juicy contributor contracts.  So don't give any of this a second thought.

driftglass:  And here comes the pivot...

Miller:  But there are people on the Left that use that same tactic on the Right.  

driftglass:  And here is where Tim Miller, confessional writer slips out the side door, and Tim Miller, veteran Republican hatchet, man slips in.

Miller:  The...no, you need to be mad at Liz Cheney because she was pro-life and she said this mean thing about Ralph Northam four years ago.  And, like, you need to be mad at Adam Kinzinger because he didn't vote for this bill.  And you need to be made at even Democrats...you need to be mad at Joe Manchin, mad at Kyrsten Sinema, and mad at Nancy Pelosi and mad at Chuck Schumer and mad at anyone who's not, like, walking the right line. 

driftglass:  And in the blink of an eye, Tim Miller escalates all the way from scolding people for being "mad at Liz Cheney" to scolding anyone who gets mad at anyone for any reason for being an Outrage Juice addict.  Which I'll remind him of in my calmest voice when the Supreme Cult comes for his gay marriage. "Hush now, Tim. That's just the Outrage Juice talking, and not your perfectly justified fury."...

Except this is not in any way just a spirited disagreement over Roe vs.Wade, or being mad at Liz Cheney for "being pro-life", and every one of these recently-former Republicans fucking well knows it.  They all know perfectly well exactly what Cheney said; they just don't own a sledgehammer big enough to pound the square peg of Cheney's utterly despicable comments into the round hole of their insistence on her unalloyed heroism.  So every time this comes up, they very deliberately skip over what she actually said and hurry on to the Slagging of the Liberals.

And when you hear what Cheney actually said, you'll understand why.  

It's not from way back when Liz was selling out her own sister to clamber a little higher up the greasy pole of politics, or ruthlessly defending her daddy's slaughterfest in Iraq.  This clip is from the House Republican YouTube channel.   It's from just four years ago, when Cheney was the third most powerful member of the Republican caucus and a staunch supporter of Donald Trump. It's entitled "Conference Chair Liz Cheney on Democrats’ Horrifying Pro-Abortion Stance".

This is not merely being pro-life, nor is it merely a "mean thing about Ralph Northam", nor is it whatever the fuck "X,Y,Z" means.  It is a full-on, Blood Libel attack on the "Democrat" party as a cabal of "pure evil" who sanction the murder of children after they are born.

In tone and intention, there is not a dime's worth of difference between Liz Cheney claiming that it is the policy of the "Democrat" party to murder babies after they are born and that Democrats are "pure evil", and Trump's branding us as lying, cheating "vermin".  

And Miller and Sykes and Longwell and all the rest of them fucking well know it.

I Am The Liberal Media