‘Warmongering neoconservative’ Liz Cheney is right about impeachment — but awful in so many other ways: journalist

During Donald Trump's four years in the White House, the bar was often so low that any conservative who was willing to call him out when he did something horrible was likely to be praised by Democrats. And now, with the former president facing his second impeachment trial — this time, for incitement to insurrection — Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is being hailed by Democrats as courageous for having the guts to vote to impeach him. Journalist John Nichols offers some analysis of Cheney in an article published on February 8, stressing that although the congresswoman is right about impeachment, she is terrible in so many other ways.

"Cheney is a corporation-coddling and warmongering neoconservative — a hate-amplifying liar whose only sin, in the eyes of her colleagues, is that she got one thing wrong," Nichols argues. "That 'one thing' was her vote to impeach Donald Trump, which the Wyoming Republican coupled with a statement declaring that 'the president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame' of the January 6 attack on the Capitol."

Cheney, the 54-year-old daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is the third highest ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives — much to the chagrin of Trump's devotees, who are hoping to see her voted out of office via a GOP congressional primary in Wyoming in the 2022 midterms. But Democrats are delighted that she lambasted Trump so forcefully when she announced that she would be voting to impeach him. Politics make strange bedfellows, and Trump's second impeachment is a rare example of Cheney being in totally agreement with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff.

"What could be more appetizing than a top Republican calling out her party's disgraced former president?," Nichols writes. "And it just got better. Trump was reportedly so furious that he was calling Capitol Hill allies and urging them to ditch Cheney as chair of the House Republican Conference. Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz labeled the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney 'a beltway bureaucrat turned fake cowgirl.'"

Nichols adds, however, that Democrats shouldn't go overboard in their praise of Cheney and overlook all of the terrible things about her.

"As Trump's Senate trial begins this week," Nichols observes, "Democrats will undoubtedly recycle Cheney's indictments of the seditionist in chief as the guilty man that he is. But they ought not make the congresswoman from Wyoming out to be some kind of hero. Nor should they imagine that she is now — or ever might be — a principled alternative to the extremists who have made the Republican Party a fever swamp of hate, fearmongering and conspiracy theories."

Nichols goes on to note some of the wacky, unhinged things Cheney has said — for example, she has claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris "sounds like Karl Marx" and has described Democrats as "the party of anti-Semitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism." And Cheney once described former Secretary of State John Kerry as someone who has "traveled around the world acting as the head of the Chamber of Commerce for the mullahs in Iran."

"Whatever credit Liz Cheney is given for standing up to Trump does not begin to erase the fact that her most consistent stance is on the side of the cruelty, the lies and the extremism that infects today's Republican Party," Nichols stresses. "That's the real reason House Republicans voted to retain Cheney as a leader of their caucus."