There's a good article in Salon touching on this and it helped me focus my thoughts. First off, Liz Cheney is almost as bad as the rest of them. Substantively there's little daylight between her and the likes of Gomert, Boebert and MGT. The WaPo and NYT, forever in search of the moderate GOP will give her the martyr treatment but she's no Rockefeller or even Barry Goldwater for that matter. When it comes to counting the votes the only difference between Cheney and a cipher like Ronny Jackson is stylistic.
The fact that she's chosen to acknowledge the undeniable reality that Joe Biden won a fairly comfortable (by recent standards) victory in November and is the duly elected President of the United States does not make her Rosa Parks. There is no civil war in the GOP, there is merely a tiny handful of elected GOPers who, on a very narrow question, have the "courage" to admit that 2+2 is 4 while the rest of the cult insists that 2+2 is 5.
For those that say "no, we need rational leaders in the GOP" or "she's not as crazy as Congressman X" - I say give it up. During my lifetime the GOP has morphed from an often-malignant band of dirty tricksters to a full blown and quite open fascist, neo-Confederate and anti-democratic terrorist group. There is no return from this drift and the presence of Liz Cheney in their leadership won't make any difference.
The GOP should be encouraged to get as crazy as possible as soon as possible. It's going to happen anyway so let's get it on. I encourage the GOP to promote as many ill-informed, incompetent and unbalanced "leaders" as they can. Say what you want about people like Nixon, James Baker or even Newt Gingrich - they weren't mediocrities or dummies. They were formidable foes. One of the advantages we have is the breadth of experienced, talented, compassionate and intelligent elected officials we have on our side. Meanwhile across the aisle, the GOP bench is less than thin when it comes to smarts, likeability and reason but thick with bluster, idiocy and incompetence. The dumber you are the higher you rise in their hierarchy, fine by me.
I suspect in the end they won't remove Cheney from leadership because of her pedigree and the negative press coverage it will likely incite - but I sure hope they do.
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