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Liz Cheney Concedes Wyoming Republican Primary

And just like that, she's gone.

Republican Liz Cheney, who has seemed to be the dominant force behind the House committee hearings over the January 6 violent melee by Trump supporters lost by a landslide in the Wyoming Republican primary yesterday and has conceded.

She gets no sympathy from me. That she recently released a campaign commercial starring her father, who in my opinion, was the most horrid and ignoble VP in history, says it all.

Democrats praising her for doing what any rational human being would do remind me of those Democrats who praised the Lincoln Project, overlooking the fact that Steve Schmidt and George Conway were among its founders/leaders. Who is Steve Schmidt? John McCain's former campaign manager who was largely responsible for McCain choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. George Conway, may be a slightly more familiar name than Schmidt, but he is also comes across to me as a less likable, somewhat shifty human being who happens to be the conservative lawyer-husband of Ms. Most Unimportant Person in the World (the mother of the beleagured teen Claudia Conway who took to Tik-Tok to promote her request for emancipation from what she alleged to be parental abuse).

[More...]

Leopards don't change their spots. Liz Cheney, in July, mailed letters to Wyoming Democrats asking that they change their party affiliation to Republican so they could vote for her in the primary. She later posted instructions how to do so on her website. Here's the graphic.

Apparently, it worked to a degree. She performed best in Teton County, Wyoming's richest, and one of only two counties Joe Biden won in 2020. Asking people to change affiliation to beat the legislative system seems to me like tricking the system. It's also the kind of machiavellian move Trump would make. Conduct unbecoming.

Liz Cheney thinks she can run for President as the Abe Lincoln of today's Republican party. She will never out-run her father's legacy, nor should we let her -- it is one she still embraces.

Back in 2004, asked to write a guest post for a conservative blog, I wrote about how I had just watched Dick Cheney's performance at a debate, and I wondered how I would have turned out if Dick Cheney had been my father.

I was watching Dick Cheney and trying to picture what it would have been like to grow up with him as my father. I mean, forget about what he was saying, just his visage and demeanor. He was so stern looking. And his tone was so authoritarian. ...

...So here’s my mental picture of me at 15, as a daughter of Cheney: I’m a runaway, standing at the downtown Port Authority. I’ve got a tattoo on my as*, a needle in my arm, a cigarette dangling from my lip, and I’m just waiting for the next Midnight Cowboy to roll off the bus. Sorry, but politics aside, doesn’t the guy just give you the creeps?

Coincidentally, in 2010, I reprinted it here on TalkLeft in a post about Giuliani, saying he made me feel the same way.

Let's just say goodbye to Republican Liz Cheney, thank her for what she tried to accomplish on the Jan. 6 Committee, and let her sit out the next four years on her ranch in Wyoming. I think if she tries to come back after that, she might find her primary adversary to be Ivanka. Hopefully I'll be living in Mexico or Europe by then.

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  • Display: Sort:
    I do not believe the sins (5.00 / 3) (#6)
    by Chuck0 on Wed Aug 17, 2022 at 04:30:54 PM EST
    of the father should be bestowed on their children. Seems like that's what you're trying to do here.

    That said, regardless of disagreement with her politics, Liz Cheney does deserve credit for taking her stance against the election deniers, the orange mob boss and all of his ilk. She has stood up to the leadership of the GQP and defended the Constitution.

    She gets kudos from me for that.


    Yes, Liz has (5.00 / 2) (#8)
    by KeysDan on Thu Aug 18, 2022 at 11:27:41 AM EST
    has "sins" of her own, no need to invoke the "bad seed theory."  Indeed, she has a sin that the father does not.

    Dick Cheney came under fierce criticism from conservatives in his party for comments he made in Oct. 2000 on gay marriage during the vice presidential debate with Senator Joe Lieberman.  Bill Kristol and other wingers essentially freaked out.

    Asked by the moderator of the debate whether gays should have all the constitutional rights enjoyed by other citizens, Mr. Cheney said that "people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into.  The Republican platform explicitly opposed gay marriage and George W. Bush, the candidate at the top of the Republican ticket, flatly opposed same sex marriage.

    Asked afterward, Mr. Cheney brushed off his critics, saying "Bernie Shaw asked me a question and I answered it truthfully and accurately, my position has not changed."

    In November 2013, during her failed run for the US Senate, Liz Cheney said she "believed in the traditional definition of marriage", even though her sister, Mary, was married to a woman. Liz was running as a more conservative alternative to Senator Mike Enzi (R..WY), who opposed gay marriage.

    Shortly after, Heath Poe, Liz's sister-in-law, struck out: "Liz has been to our home, has spent time and shared holidays with our children, and when Mary and I got married in 2012, she didn't hesitate to tell us how happy she was for us."  "To have her now say she doesn't support our right to marry is offensive to say the least."

    Her sister, Mary, followed up with "Liz, this isn't just an issue on which we disagree, you're just wrong, and on the wrong side of history."

    In Sept. 2021, Liz admitted she was "wrong to oppose gay marriage in the past."  "I love my sister very much."  "I believe my dad was right."

    Parent

    It's the corner the Republicans (5.00 / 1) (#9)
    by jondee on Thu Aug 18, 2022 at 02:36:21 PM EST
    have painted themselves and the country into, isn't it?

    Now they ALL have to genuflect to varying degrees to medieval-minded religious conservatives from Gilead, or they won't get elected head dogcatcher.

    Parent

    Even (5.00 / 1) (#10)
    by FlJoe on Thu Aug 18, 2022 at 04:37:04 PM EST
    when they win, Republicans have a pathological compulsion to lie Liz Cheney releases recording that proves her rival lied on Fox News about concession call and it's not just the whackos. There are very few Republicans who do not lie through their teeth everytime they open their yap.

    It's not (5.00 / 2) (#11)
    by KeysDan on Thu Aug 18, 2022 at 06:11:34 PM EST
    hyperbolic to say the Republican Party is the greatest threat to democracy and the country.  

    Parent
    Is Running as an Write-in Worth a Try? (none / 0) (#1)
    by RickyJim on Wed Aug 17, 2022 at 10:42:57 AM EST
    It worked for Murkowski in Alaska in 2010 when she lost the primary to a Tea Party candidate.  

    Also I don't agree with the sentiment in this statement, "Asking people to change affiliation to beat the legislative system seems to me like tricking the system. It's also the kind of machiavellian move Trump would make. Conduct unbecoming".  As a foe of the 2 party system, I would go for anything to diminish it like ranked choice voting, open primaries, etc.

    Washington state uses an open primary. (none / 0) (#4)
    by Donald from Hawaii on Wed Aug 17, 2022 at 02:55:45 PM EST
    Basically, all candidates for a given office run in the same pool where anybody can vote for them regardless of party preference / affiliation. (In some places, it's called a "jungle primary.")

    Closed primaries create an artificial construct because only voters who've registered a party preference can only vote in their chosen party's primary, and the results don't necessarily reflect the actual views of the mainstream electorate and in fact, can serve to undermine them.

    In Florida, for example, as the GOP lurched toward the far-right of the political spectrum, state voters via referendum restored the vote to convicted felons. The following year, the GOP-dominated state legislature then proceeded to thwart the will of the people by passing a bill which predicated a felon's right to vote on his / her ability to pay restitution.

    Personally, I don't care for ranked-choice voting. We're not choosing a high school homecoming or prom court. We're supposedly trying to elect the one person to an office who we think can best do the job. And ranked-choice voting can result in the election to office of a candidate who was the first choice of only a very decided minority of voters.

    Consider, for example, the case of former Oakland, CA Mayor Jean Quan, who was elected to office in 2010 via ranked-choice voting. The top three finishers that year among a field of 10 candidates were Quan, Don Perata, and Rebecca Kaplan. In the initial tally on election night, Perata led Quan, 40,342 (33.7%) to 29,266 (24.5%) but because he did not garner a mandatory 50% + 1 majority of the first-place votes, the instant runoff kicked in.

    The votes were then re-tallied by eliminating each candidate at the bottom, until one candidate obtained a majority. After nine rounds of candidate elimination, the last candidate to be eliminated was Kaplan, the third-place candidate.

    Kaplan's votes were then allocated according to each voter's wishes to the remaining two candidates, Perata and Quan. The Alameda County Registrar then declared Quan the winner after it was determined that she had garnered a majority of the 105,769 valid "continuing" votes.

    However, I would note here that there were actually 122,268 ballots cast in the 2010 mayoral election. The 16,499 voters who chose mayoral candidates from that field of 10 other than the top three saw their ballots effectively discarded by round nine in the instant runoff. And although they constituted 13% of the active electorate that year, because they had listed neither Quan nor Peralta in their ranked choices, they had absolutely no say in the final outcome.

    Why is that important? Because by the tenth round of instant runoff, Jean Quan was declared the winner after it was determined that she had received with 51% of "continuing" votes (53,897) to Perata's 49% (51,872). That's a difference of only 2,025 votes.

    Had there been an actual runoff election between Quan and Perata as the top two finishers, perhaps those 13% of Oakland voters whose 16,499 ballots did not factor in the 10th round outcome could have possibly swung it the other way, had they been given an opportunity to vote again in a separate election. Instead, even though they had voted, their votes ultimately did not count at all in the final official tally.

    Aloha.

    Parent

    I agree that ranked choice isn't optimal (none / 0) (#7)
    by RickyJim on Wed Aug 17, 2022 at 08:02:54 PM EST
    Best, IMHO, is an open primary followed by a first runoff of the 5 (or pick your favorite number) highest scoring candidates, followed by a runoff of the top two from the first runoff if the latter had no decisive winner. Is this what is done in Georgia?

    Parent
    I agree with (none / 0) (#2)
    by KeysDan on Wed Aug 17, 2022 at 11:51:01 AM EST
    Jeralyn's take on Liz Cheney.  Yes, she has seen the light on Trump these days and is an effective member of the J6 Committee. To her great credit, she found a line she would not cross, although she crossed several Trumpian lines before getting there.

    She is a Republican, and all that goes with that. As an example: Her stance on abortion includes outrageous lies (Jan 6, 2019):  "..can't allow radical wing of Democratic Party to "turn over maternity wards into killing fields"  "I will work with House Republicans and President Trump to end the Democrats' horrifying extremist agenda." Toward that end she supported the "Born-alive Abortion Survivors Act."

    She might not be a republican long (none / 0) (#3)
    by CaptHowdy on Wed Aug 17, 2022 at 12:21:55 PM EST
    You are correct of course about her politics.  

    But fighting with people like her about her ideas is what the country is supposed to be.

    That's not what it now is.

    Personally I will do everything I can outside of voting for her to help her rout the the fascists.

    For one thing I'm not seeing anyone else on the right willing or able to take on the fascists.
    Or even care that much about them.  
    She is and she does.

    If Adam Kinzinger develops a national following he will have my support.

    I think what she is doing, she just a PAC called The Great Task, is important.
    As important as anything in my lifetime.
    I don't have to support Liz Cheney to support her anti fascist cause.  

    If she doesn't stop them who will.


    Parent

    Jeralyn (none / 0) (#5)
    by Ga6thDem on Wed Aug 17, 2022 at 03:54:15 PM EST
    where are you thinking about living in Mexico or Europe?