EDITORIAL: Liz Cheney and the fatal miscalculation

They’ve got the long knives out for Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), who on Wednesday morning was ousted as chair of the House Republican Conference. She was the third-most powerful member of the entire GOP; now she’s a pariah..

Cheney, who is the daughter of the only US vice president to shoot a man in the face while in office, committed an unpardonable sin amongst the current crop of Republicans: She told the truth, out loud.

Everybody knows that Trump lost the 2020 election. Everybody knows that there was no massive election fraud — even the people who are claiming to be looking for it.

The only ones left buying this crap are the professionally ignorant, the information-averse, the ones for whom cognitive dissonance has finally bloomed into mental illness. Everyone else is just pretending.

Cheney also had the audacity to point out that Trump was the driving force behind the Jan. 6 insurrection, which is why it’s called Trump’s Insurrection. And when it came time to choose between party and country, Cheney voted to impeach Trump.

She never believed the Big Lie.

The GOP’s charge was led by our very own Rep. Virginia Foxx, whose subservience to the former president is well documented, as is her frequent rejection of truth. And it happens just a month after she announced her re-election bid.

And that is the thing: Every single Republican in the House wants to be re-elected, and they all seem to believe that the Big Lie is the best tack to take. That’s business as usual.

What’s alarming is the extent to which they will go to perpetuate this lie: excommunicating Republican royalty. Cheney won her 2020 re-election bid with 185,732 votes; that’s 2/3 of all votes cast. Wyoming is a pretty small state, but she remains enormously popular there.

Still. Look what they did to Mitt Romney, who was booed off the stage at a GOP convention in his home state of Utah.

But the Big Lie is losing steam. Trump, its main perpetrator has largely been silenced — after his social media ban, he’s seen by most Americans only in short clips where he looks like he’s just trying not to crap himself. The audience has contracted to the lowest practitioners of the Republican pedagogy, many of whom will eventually get coronavirus.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, vaccinations are flowing, the stock market is going up and houses are fetching top dollar. Why would any of us want to go back?