[She says Donald Trump crossed a line. But the Bush-Cheney
administration didn’t? ] [[link removed]]

HOW LIZ CHENEY AND HER DAD PAVED THE WAY FOR THE BIG LIE  
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David Corn

Mother Jones

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_ She says Donald Trump crossed a line. But the Bush-Cheney
administration didn’t? _

Liz Cheney in Buffalo Wyoming by Milonica, licensed under CC BY-SA
3.0

 

In recent days, Liz Cheney has become the hot celeb of the American
media-political world. The conservative Republican representative from
Wyoming is on the verge of being excommunicated from the House GOP
leadership ranks because she has dared to speak
[[link removed]] an
inconvenient truth: Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and his
incitement of the seditious attack on the US Capitol “is a line that
cannot be crossed.” Those recent remarks—coupled with her vote to
convict Trump during Impeachment II—have provoked outrage from the
Trump cultists within her party who are now demanding she be stripped
of her post as the conference chair, the No. 3 spot in the Republican
House caucus. And the betting odds are not in favor of the daughter of
former Vice President Dick Cheney. 

Cheney is undergoing a GOP version of a Soviet show trial. She has not
demonstrated full and complete obedience to the party leader, so she
must be destroyed. This is Orwellian. As the author of _1984_ wrote,
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and
you would have to believe it.” And in that dystopian novel, poor
Winston Smith is tortured at the Ministry of Love until he shouts two
plus two equals five. Only then is he allowed to rejoin society.
Cheney challenges Trump’s Big Lie—I won!—and refuses to
whitewash the January 6 attack and Trump’s responsibility for it.
Consequently, GOP Big Brother must squash her, and it looks as if her
fellow House Republicans will vote to remove her from the conference
chair. If they could defenestrate her, they probably would. 

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But for accepting reality and stating the obvious—Biden won, and
it’s bad for a president to encourage a violent assault on
Congress—Cheney (outside of Republican congressional circles) has
won hoorays. Writing on CNN’s website, GOP consultant Scott
Jennings observed
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Cheney is “now positioned as a principled martyr.” In a
recent _Washington Post _column
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she wrapped herself in such noble garb, slamming Trump for “seeking
to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make
democracy work—confidence in the result of elections and the rule of
law. No other American president has ever done this.” And she noted,
“The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must
decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the
Constitution.” Cheney also sharply pointed out that her boss, Rep.
Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House Republican leader, said in
January that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack on
Congress “by mob rioters”—but has shifted his position since
then. 

Cheney does these days look like a courageous truth-teller, defying
the cultism and alternative-fact addiction that has taken over her
Grand Old Party. But, in a way, she is the victim of her own
success–that is, the success of her family. In particular, the
success her father had in lying to the American public.

In the 21st century, American presidents have at least twice tried to
shape the world with a lie of enormous impact. Trump attempted to
demolish the nation’s constitutional order and retain power with his
false claim that the 2020 election was rigged and Joe Biden did not
truly receive more votes. As Cheney points out, this lie delegitimizes
the essence of the American political system. And two decades ago,
another Big Lie was concocted and pushed by a Republican president
that resulted in profound (and lethal) consequences. Her dad was its
main architect.

That was the untrue allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
of destruction and was prepared to use them against the United States.
The Bush-Cheney administration used these charges to garner public
support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Dick Cheney was the chief
pitchman for this flimflam. In an August 2002 speech, he proclaimed,
“There is no doubt [Saddam] is amassing [WMDs] to use against our
friends, against our allies, and against us.” Soon after that, he
publicly asserted that Saddam was trying to obtain aluminum tubes that
could only be used for enriching uranium for weapons. And he also
publicly cited a report that one of the 9/11 ringleaders had met with
an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.

None of this was true. And Dick Cheney’s lies were not the result of
intelligence failures. US intelligence over the previous year had
assessed that Saddam did not have a worrisome WMD program. Government
scientists had concluded that the aluminum tubes in question were not
usable for weapon-grade enrichment. And the CIA had discredited that
Prague report. Yet none of this inhibited Cheney and President George
W. Bush. They spent months dishing out an assortment of false
statements—including the untrue claim that Saddam was in league with
al-Qaeda—to grease the way to war. They succeeded. Bush won the
support of Congress and the American public for his massive blunder in
Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam’s dictatorship but it yielded a
geo-strategic and deadly mess in the region. About 200,000 Iraqi
civilians died in the ensuing years due to the war. More than 4,000
American soldiers lost their lives in the war. 

One lesson of the Iraq war is that a big lie can work. Liz Cheney, who
was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs
during this stretch, supported the war—and has defended
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ever since. (She co-wrote a 2015 book with her dad on US foreign
policy.) She even insisted that one of the main lies of the
Bush-Cheney fraudulent case for war—that there had been a
significant connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq—was true. (She also
hawkishly defended
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sordid chapter of that sordid war: torture, saying
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was “libelous” to call waterboarding “torture.”)

There was another odious lie that Liz Cheney also defended—or played
footsie with: the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama
was born in Kenya. Asked about birtherism in 2009, she replied
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“I think the Democrats have got more crazies than the Republicans
do. But setting that aside, one of the reasons you see people so
concerned about this, I think this issue is, people are uncomfortable
with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so
reluctant to defend the nation overseas.” Without endorsing the
conspiratorial and disproven details of this nutty notion, Cheney was
providing moral support to its adherents. (Trump’s championship of
this lie helped turn him into a right-wing hero and set up the
foundation for his 2016 presidential bid.) 

It is a good thing that a hardcore conservative like Liz Cheney has
joined the opposition to the Trumpian authoritarianism that has fully
infected one of the nation’s two major political parties. Most of
the GOP base is beyond persuasion. A recent poll showed that 70
percent of Republicans believe Biden did not win the election
legitimately. The denialists lost in the swamps of Foxlandia won’t
be swayed by a Liz Cheney op-ed. But for conservative Americans who
give a damn about Trump’s war on reality and the
Constitution—unfortunately, a minority—Cheney’s current stance
could boost their spirits and spine. And the fight to protect American
democracy needs as many enlistees as can be mustered, on the left, in
the middle, and on the right. 

Still, Liz Cheney deserves hardly a cheer, for it ought to be
remembered that Trump is pushing his Big Lie in the wake of other big
lies—and that Cheney, her father, and so many other Republicans not
so long ago did much to blaze the path for the dangerous political
villainy she now decries.

_David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief and an on-air
analyst for MSNBC. He is the co-author (with Michael Isikoff)
of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and
the Election of Donald Trump. He is the author of three New York Times
bestsellers, Showdown, Hubris (with Isikoff), and The Lies of
George W. Bush, as well as the e-book, 47 Percent: Uncovering the
Romney Video that Rocked the 2012 Election. For more of his
stories, click here [[link removed]].
He's also on Twitter
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