Yeah, Liz Cheney, Conscience Warrior, Soul of GOP, yadda yadda.
I don’t need to go into detail of just how horrible this person is. Charles Blow and front pagers here are on it, though none, to my knowledge, has highlighted the Anglerette’s dissing her own sister’s right to marry in an attempt to take Mike Enzi’s Senate seat.
Nor is anyone talking about why Ms. Cheney felt so confident in her GOP mojo that she’d even think to challenge a sitting Republican senator in the Cowboy State, where she was such a greenhorn she had to lie on her application to get a resident fishing license. What could give someone that kind of what Michele Bachmann called chootspah?
To answer that, we have to go back more than a dozen years before the Enzi/Cheney primary to when young Liz was helping out her old pa in the Herculean task of vetting possible running mates for George W. Bush.
As told by Barton Gellman in “Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency,” Dick Cheney called up one prominent Republican after another, telling them they were on the short list, no more than five candidates under consideration. Of course, the campaign would have to do serious preemptive op-research on anyone considered, so here’s a questionnaire, tell us everything…
Though Gellman centered on the “vetting” of Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, the story was the same for Bill Frist, John Kasich, Tom Ridge and a host of others: You’re on the short list, confess everything, bring documents.
And…
“The only thing was,” Alexander recalled, “I never heard from him again.”
Secrecy was part of the bargain Cheney struck in the first week of April, when he agreed to run Bush’s vice- presidential search. Worked best out of the limelight, he said. Fewer involved, fewer the leaks, fewer the egos to stroke. For Cheney, the low profile was a means to an end, the way to get things done without obstruction. Bush did not worry about losing control—the final word was his anyway—but he enjoyed the cloak- and- dagger by temperament. Old hands had long observed the pure pleasure he took in ambushing know- it- alls in the press, subverting expectations of critics and rivals. Aides who followed Bush and Cheney to Washington would see the pattern again and again, not only in their mutual secrecy but in the way the two men reached a meeting of minds for different reasons entirely. “Cheney was pushing on an open door,” recalled Dan Bartlett, who became White House communications director, even if Bush took a different path to meet him.
Not even Bush’s closest aides were allowed inside the machine that Cheney built to sift the vice- presidential contenders. Not Dan Bartlett, not Karen Hughes, not Karl Rove, and not Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s former chief of staff and campaign manager. Sometimes Bush would tell his people about a candidate or a piece of advice he heard, like the letter from Dan Quayle on behalf of Lamar Alexander. (Quayle pitched Alexander as the kind of right- to- lifer who doesn’t scare off swing voters. Rove cared a lot more about the base than the swing, but he phoned Quayle to let him know that Bush had shared his note.) There were plenty of things Bush could not have told his retinue, though, because he did not know all the fine points himself. He was a big- picture man, comfortable with broad objectives, broadly declared. He had given Cheney marching orders, described the qualities he wanted in his Number Two. He left most of the legwork to the older man, taking briefings when his vetter had something new to say. Cheney lived in a different world. He had spent his professional life in places where ends and means collide, where the choices are often zero- sum and outcomes ride on the details.
Only three people were privy to the dossiers that Cheney assembled. One was his older daughter, Liz Cheney, thirty- three, a politically active lawyer who had left the State Department for private practice. Another was David J. Gribbin III, a loyal retainer since high school who had followed Cheney to Congress, the Pentagon, and Halliburton. The third was David Addington, the gifted and ferocious attorney who had been Cheney’s intellectual alter ego since the Iran-Contra hearings of 1987.
[bolding added]
Basically, Dick and Liz hoovered up every possible speck of kompromat on every prominent ‘Pub who fell for it, tucked the files away and blew off the marks. And, nearly a decade later, when the movers wheeled Dick’s man-sized safe back to McLean, those men were still in it. Of course, Liz thought she could boss around the ‘Pub establishment; she had half of ‘em self-bagged.
I imagine the Cheneys planned to leapfrog Liz into the Senate then position her to run for the White House in 2016. But, sucks for them, the establishment bit back, with the NRSC backing Enzi. Liz’s Senate dreams crashed and burned. Worse, whatever dirt daddy and daughter had gathered in 2000 was getting way sell-by.
Then came the final blow: Donald Trump. The energy of the Tea Party with the intellectual heft of reality television. Unburdened by subtlety or shame, Trump towed a baggage car of publicly-acknowledged sins that likely made anything in the Dad Dossier seem like a school prank.
Even worse, he brought his own kompromat that he hadn’t even gathered himself, just begged it off Vladimir Putin, for god’s sake.
Liz and Dick had to sit by and watch the party and their neocon dream destroyed by a third-rate gangster ignoramus in Russia’s pocket. When it was her turn!
I could be wrong about Rep. Cheney. She may be genuinely outraged at Trump’s coup attempt. She might believe the GOP stands for some higher principle that must be defended.
Maybe. But I think she’s just pissed ‘cause Baby Huey stole her brass ring.