The mainstream media can’t seem to stop themselves from twisting into pretzels in an exhilarated effort to defend and elevate any familiar face who comes out against former President Donald Trump.
While the shameless glorification of any Republican who speaks out against actual conservatives has been going on for years, the new liberal love affair with U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is one nobody could have seen coming before Trump’s descent down the golden escalator.
For over a decade, there were constant books, movies, and endless articles about the evils of the Cheneys. Perhaps correctly, Liz’s father—former Vice President Dick Cheney—has been portrayed as a hawkish nightmare with an insatiable thirst for war, destruction, oil exploitation, and capitalistic evil. The press has called his daughter the “spawn of Satan” (among other epithets) countless times.
But that was then. Thanks to her outspoken criticism of Trump in the wake of the disputed November election, Cheney today is the most lauded politician in the land—the Beltway media’s flavor of the week. Cheney is praised and fawned over for one reason and one reason only: she is a Republican, or so she says, who opposes the America First wing of the party and who voted to impeach Trump.
The devoted daughter of a man who cost thousands of lives and battered an economy with the instigation of seemingly endless foreign wars is now suddenly a brave hero standing up to the fabricated injustices of the party.
Even with Trump out of office, everything always seems to return to the media’s obsession with the 45th president.
The Washington Post, which is notoriously quick to shut down op-ed submissions from Republicans, bestowed Cheney with a massive platform to peddle her nonsense that she is some kind of savior of the Grand Old Party. In a similar vein, they turned an obscure politician like Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) into a mini-celebrity because of his willingness to slag his own voting base.
The press has fleeting love affairs with these traitors, writhing in excitement at anyone with a red tag beside their name who jumps on the anti-Trump bandwagon when it is politically convenient.
It’s not that the media likes Cheney; of course, they do not. But they know when a useful idiot will make a good weapon in an attempt to bludgeon Trump and his voters. (For his part, Trump looks at this all from his sprawling golf course as child’s play.)
The fact that the liberal media had long presented themselves as being against war and intervention—precisely what Liz Cheney stands for—would make this love affair bizarre if it weren’t for the fact that newsrooms across D.C. had already and suddenly became foreign policy hawks when Trump said he wanted to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan. (Trump equals reckless, Biden equals amazing!) Hypocrisy at its finest.
In fact, one of the only times the media cheered for Trump was when he bombed Syria. It is doubtful that they wanted that to happen, but they had to put aside their supposed values and cheer instead of looking like hypocrites on the subject. After all, they had been relentlessly bashing him for being too much of a dove and being too “reckless” by wanting to bring our men and women in uniform home from this useless and costly 20-year war.
Let’s hope this unholy romance is just a summer fling so that one of Cheney’s primary challengers can send the wretched carpetbagger packing.