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Date: November 01, 2024 at 17:01:06
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: How Liz Cheney and Her Dad Paved the Way for the Big Lie |
URL: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/how-liz-cheney-and-her-dad-paved-the-way-for-the-big-lie/ |
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2021
How Liz Cheney and Her Dad Paved the Way for the Big Lie
She says Donald Trump crossed a line. But the Bush-Cheney administration
didn’t?
excerpt:
"Cheney does these days look like a courageous truth-teller, defying the
cultism and alternative-fact addiction that has taken over her Grand Old Party.
But, in a way, she is the victim of her own success–that is, the success of her
family. In particular, the success her father had in lying to the American public.
In the 21st century, American presidents have at least twice tried to shape the
world with a lie of enormous impact. Trump attempted to demolish the nation’s
constitutional order and retain power with his false claim that the 2020 election
was rigged and Joe Biden did not truly receive more votes. As Cheney points
out, this lie delegitimizes the essence of the American political system. And two
decades ago, another Big Lie was concocted and pushed by a Republican
president that resulted in profound (and lethal) consequences. Her dad was its
main architect.
That was the untrue allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass of
destruction and was prepared to use them against the United States. The
Bush-Cheney administration used these charges to garner public support for
the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Dick Cheney was the chief pitchman for this flimflam.
In an August 2002 speech, he proclaimed, “There is no doubt [Saddam] is
amassing [WMDs] to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
Soon after that, he publicly asserted that Saddam was trying to obtain
aluminum tubes that could only be used for enriching uranium for weapons.
And he also publicly cited a report that one of the 9/11 ringleaders had met with
an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.
None of this was true. And Dick Cheney’s lies were not the result of intelligence
failures. US intelligence over the previous year had assessed that Saddam did
not have a worrisome WMD program. Government scientists had concluded
that the aluminum tubes in question were not usable for weapon-grade
enrichment. And the CIA had discredited that Prague report. Yet none of this
inhibited Cheney and President George W. Bush. They spent months dishing
out an assortment of false statements—including the untrue claim that Saddam
was in league with al-Qaeda—to grease the way to war. They succeeded. Bush
won the support of Congress and the American public for his massive blunder
in Iraq.
The invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam’s dictatorship but it yielded a geo-
strategic and deadly mess in the region. About 200,000 Iraqi civilians died in
the ensuing years due to the war. More than 4,000 American soldiers lost their
lives in the war.
One lesson of the Iraq war is that a big lie can work. Liz Cheney, who was
deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs during this stretch,
supported the war—and has defended it ever since. (She co-wrote a 2015 book
with her dad on US foreign policy.) She even insisted that one of the main lies of
the Bush-Cheney fraudulent case for war—that there had been a significant
connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq—was true. (She also hawkishly
defended a sordid chapter of that sordid war: torture, saying it was “libelous” to
call waterboarding “torture.”)
There was another odious lie that Liz Cheney also defended—or played footsie
with: the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in
Kenya. Asked about birtherism in 2009, she replied, “I think the Democrats
have got more crazies than the Republicans do. But setting that aside, one of
the reasons you see people so concerned about this, I think this issue is, people
are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who
seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas.” Without endorsing the
conspiratorial and disproven details of this nutty notion, Cheney was providing
moral support to its adherents. (Trump’s championship of this lie helped turn
him into a right-wing hero and set up the foundation for his 2016 presidential
bid.)
It is a good thing that a hardcore conservative like Liz Cheney has joined the
opposition to the Trumpian authoritarianism that has fully infected one of the
nation’s two major political parties. Most of the GOP base is beyond persuasion.
A recent poll showed that 70 percent of Republicans believe Biden did not win
the election legitimately. The denialists lost in the swamps of Foxlandia won’t
be swayed by a Liz Cheney op-ed. But for conservative Americans who give a
damn about Trump’s war on reality and the Constitution—unfortunately, a
minority—Cheney’s current stance could boost their spirits and spine. And the
fight to protect American democracy needs as many enlistees as can be
mustered, on the left, in the middle, and on the right.
Still, Liz Cheney deserves hardly a cheer, for it ought to be remembered that
Trump is pushing his Big Lie in the wake of other big lies—and that Cheney,
her father, and so many other Republicans not so long ago did much to blaze
the path for the dangerous political villainy she now decries."
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443646 |
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Date: November 01, 2024 at 17:08:56
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Cheney’s addiction to war is bipartisan.... The lawless Liz Cheney |
URL: https://thespectator.com/topic/the-lawless-liz-cheney/ |
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there are many links to sources within this article
Jack Hunter
The lawless Liz Cheney
"Her stumping for the ‘rule of law’ is undermined by her record
Saturday, June 11, 2022
Congresswoman Liz Cheney had a supposedly shining moment this week as
she sat on the January 6 committee to lecture the Capitol attackers and anyone
in league with former President Donald Trump about the importance of the rule
of law.
Cheney has long said the committee was about “fidelity” to the Constitution.
Seriously? Liz Cheney? Dick’s neocon daughter?
People are buying this? I don’t even know where to start.
In 2011, when libertarian-leaning Republican Justin Amash and many in the Tea
Party movement insisted that President Barack Obama did not have the
constitutional authority to bomb Libya, Cheney, Senator John McCain and other
establishment politicians said to hell with the Constitution. When Obama finally
did bomb Libya, Republican Senator Rand Paul noted that the president had
violated the War Powers Act.
Cheneys: So?
Cheney’s addiction to war is bipartisan. When Trump ordered a strike on Syria
in 2018, that was also unconstitutional. Yet Cheney praised the military action.
She didn’t seem worried about the rule of law back then.
The US hasn’t waged an actual constitutional war, meaning one that Congress
has declared, since World War II. In that time, someone named Cheney, whether
Liz or her pops, has been there to root for plenty of these illegal conflicts and to
pray they become endless.
Someone in Congress also almost always points out that these wars are
outside the bounds of America’s governing charter. Yet the Cheneys don’t care.
Then there’s the torture. The Cheneys don’t necessarily use that word, of
course, but they’ve defended practices that in any context would be considered
torture.
Like waterboarding, which the Reagan administration definitely considered
torture. Torture is also illegal, if the rule of law is of any concern.
It’s not for Liz Cheney. Anytime this becomes an issue, expect to find Cheney
firmly in the pro-torture camp.
Hell, torture might as well be their family business — the law be damned.
There’s also Cheney’s disregard for constitutional privacy rights and the Fourth
Amendment.
To say Cheneys love the Patriot Act would be an understatement, yet a federal
court ruled in 2004 that the law violated the Constitution.
On the mass surveillance conducted by the government against, well,
everyone, revealed to the world by Edward Snowden in 2013, Liz is definitely on
the side of the government snoops and firmly against the whistleblower whom
she considers a traitor. Never mind that a federal judge ruled that the mass
surveillance Snowden revealed was illegal.
Cheney didn’t crow about the rule of law after that court decision in 2020.
Indeed, when it comes to the war on terror and the George W. Bush-era brand
that she and her father have spent their lives defending — from drone strikes to
black sites to Gitmo — Cheneys can regularly be found outside the bounds of
the law as defined by our courts and public conversations about the legality
and morality of such practices.
One could argue that Cheney’s support for these unlawful acts is as much as,
or even more of, a threat to American democracy than what took place on
January 6, 2021.
Maintaining the rule of law is vital to peace and order in America’s constitutional
republic. One can’t help but notice that it’s habitual outlaw Liz Cheney who’s
being given credit for saying so."
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