The Other McCain

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Who Hates Republican Voters Worse, Allahpundit or Liz Cheney?

Posted on | August 17, 2022 | Comments Off on Who Hates Republican Voters Worse, Allahpundit or Liz Cheney?

Tuesday, I said that Liz Cheney might lose by a 30-point margin, which was wrong — it was 38 points! She lost more than 2-to-1 and didn’t even get 30% of the vote in Wyoming’s Republican primary. Her contempt for the electorate — her fathomless hatred for Republican voters — was expressed quite clearly in her concession speech:

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all,” she said before an audience of what few supporters she has. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”
Hardly finished with her delusional Civil War era comparisons, Cheney went on to equate her ongoing fight with former President Donald Trump to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of the Wilderness.
“As the fires of the battle still smoldered, Grant rode to the head of the column. He rode to the intersection of Brock Road and Orange Plank Road, and there, as the men of his army watched and waited,” Cheney said. “Instead of turning north back towards Washington and safety, Grant turned his horse south toward Richmond and the heart of [Confederate Gen. Robert E.] Lee’s army. Refusing to retreat, he pressed on to victory.”

That scene, portrayed vividly in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, indeed captures what made Grant different from any of his predecessors commanding the Army of the Potomac, who had a habit of getting into a fight with Lee, losing thousands of men in a battle, and then retreating to the fortifications of Washington. But how does it function as an analogy for Liz Cheney’s defeat? That is to say, who is the enemy she proposes to defeat if she presses “on to victory”?

Do you get the point? The enemy is you, the Republican voter!

Cast your mind back to November 2012, when you went to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney. Chances are, Mitt wasn’t your first choice for the GOP nomination. Probably, he wasn’t your second or third choice, either. You probably weren’t too excited to go vote for Mitt on Election Day 2012, and might not have been too optimistic about his chances of beating Obama, but you voted for him anyway, because he was the Republican nominee and you’re a Republican voter. If millions of conservatives could vote for Romney — who has always been a moderate, if not indeed a liberal — then why couldn’t moderate Republicans support Trump? Why is it that the demands of party loyalty seem to be a one-way street like this? And, by the way, shouldn’t it matter that Trump was far more popular and successful than GOP Establishment choices like Romney and John McCain? The Republican presidential candidates got about 60 million votes in both 2008 and 2012, but Trump got 63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020. Why such hatred from “Republicans” toward a man who increased the GOP vote by more than 10 million?

Liz Cheney and the rest of the #NeverTrump crew will never answer that question, because they avoid any situation where they would be required to answer it. Oh, they can go on endlessly about why they hate Trump, but what about their hatred of the people who elected Trump?

That’s the real issue here, you see. All these people keep talking about the need to save Our Democracy™ — from whom? The voters!

Apparently, these defenders of Our Democracy™ believe that elections should be decided by a consensus of elite pundits, and that actual voters should just go along with the choices made by the wealthy and influential insiders who control both parties. Finally, in 2016, the voters replied with two words; the first was an obscene verb and the second was “you.”

It was our refusal to let the elites have their choice that made us, the Republican voters, the enemy that Liz Cheney proposes to defeat.

Which brings us, finally, to Allahpundit, the RINO that Ace of Spades has ridden like a rented mule for the past five years. In a Tuesday post contemplating the certainty of Cheney’s defeat, Allahpundit mused:

I think of the Trump-era GOP as a 30/50/20 proposition. Thirty percent are fanatics who’ll support him in whatever he wants to do. If he wins a second term and asks the new Republican Congress to pass an enabling act so that he can rule by decree, the 30 percent will say that it’ll be great not to have to worry about congressional gridlock anymore. At the other pole are the 20 percent, the people like me who find all of this endlessly repulsive and would struggle to think of an unkind word to say about Cheney after she sacrificed her career to hold Trump accountable for trying to stage a coup. She committed an act of civic heroism and demonstrated honor to a downright freakish degree among American politicians. And she knows it, which I imagine is why she’s at peace with losing this race 70/30.
As for the remaining 50 percent, I find that Cheney makes an excellent litmus test in identifying them. The 50 percent aren’t Trump fanatics, as they’re forever eager to assure you, but they’re the sort of hardcore partisans who’ll vote GOP no matter what the GOP is serving up. Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, J.D. Vance — better an autocrat with an “R” after their name than a Democrat. Ask any of these people how they feel about Cheney and you’ll find them hard-pressed to praise her even though, in theory, they broadly agree with her about Trump and January 6. The partisanship always gets in the way. Their highest allegiance is to the GOP and so, for lizard-brain reasons, they can’t allow that someone who’s spent 18 months antagonizing the head of their party and his cronies in Congress is doing an unvarnishedly noble thing. Her methods are wrong, or her messaging has been wrong, or she should have done X, Y, or Z slightly differently, yadda yadda.
It’s the 50 percent who have run this party into a ditch, not the MAGA 30 percent. If the 30 percent got a hard lesson from the 50 percent that nominating autocrats would mean electing Democrats, they’d rethink. It’s the enabling 50 percent who’ll provide the landslide margin against Cheney tonight. Never forget it.

Trust me, pal, we will never forget it. Nor are we likely to forget how you’ve been paid by a “conservative” media operation all these years, despite your unvarnished hatred of actual conservatives.

And how is it that “hardcore partisans . . . have run this party into a ditch”? Are you saying that the people who elected Trump have done more damage than the GOP Establishment types who, by nominating guaranteed losers like John McCain and Mitt Romney, ensured that Barack Obama would be elected and re-elected? Boy, you couldn’t run a successful campaign for middle-school class president. In choosing Liz Cheney as your heroine, you got what you deserved.

(Image via MsEBL on Twitter.)




 

Category: Republicans, Wyoming

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