Last Friday, former vice president Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president instead of Donald Trump. In more relevant news, my wife and I tried a new ice cream shop we found. It was meh.
In what CNN unconvincingly described as a “stunning move,” Cheney called Donald Trump the “greatest threat to our republic” in our nation’s 248-year history and claimed that “[Trump] tried to steal the last election using lies and violence.” But anyone who has been watching the Cheneys knows there is nothing “stunning” about their hypocrisy in casting their supposed anti-violence votes against the candidate who tried to get the National Guard deployed to the Capitol on January 6 and who implored the protesters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” in favor of the candidate who helped raise $40 million to free violent BLM and Antifa insurrectionists.
It’s gotten beyond tiresome to argue in perpetuity with facts and evidence that the Left is unequivocally the party of violent street thugs who openly fight for the overthrow of the Constitution. The sky is blue. Taylor Swift is overrated. The Democrats use brownshirt tactics to affect their will through coercion and terrorism. This late in the game, those who don’t see this simply don’t want to see it. So my intention here is not to spend an entire article relitigating the obvious.
Assuming that Cheney’s endorsement is either coveted or beneficial speaks to an arrogance that only the most sheltered and detached of Washington swamp creatures enjoy. Cheney joins a short and uninfluential cadre of RINOs whose recent broadsides against conservatives and the Republican Party reflect not honor and integrity but a lack thereof.
It exposes the narcissism, resentment, and rigid inability to adapt to present-day circumstances. The cocktail party Republicans dogmatically refuse to concede that the ol’ country club, wink-and-nod way of cutting backroom deals with Democrats is increasingly a relic of the past. The fire eaters and true believers of the Squad/Sanders bent have largely ousted whatever remains of the Old Guard Liebermans and Manchins.
Related: Et Tu, Dick? Former Vice President Endorses Kamala Harris
Adam Kinzinger thought he could save his House seat from Democrat redistricting if he jumped on board the anti-Trump train. And after giving him lip service to bipartisanship and duty to country, the Democrats redistricted him out of office anyway. As for Cheney, the Democrats spent the better part of his administration calling for his persecution as a war criminal. If he thinks he’s now building bridges of reconciliation with the Left as a result of their fleeting approbations, he still doesn’t understand what Lenin meant by the term “useful idiots.”
But his endorsement also speaks to something darker. It speaks to betrayal. If you don’t like Trump or his personality, I understand why you wouldn’t enthusiastically endorse him. But we rank-and-file conservatives nevertheless expect you to hold your nose and vote for him. Why? Because that’s what we’ve done for you for over two decades now. The Bush-Cheney ticket was nobody’s idea of principled conservatism. Your coinage of “compassionate conservatism” rang a lot of instinctive alarm bells, but we held our noses and voted for you anyway.
And then we held our noses and voted for McCain. And then we held our noses and voted for Romney. We didn’t call for the packing of the Supreme Court after the disastrous Roberts-led decision upholding Obamacare in 2012. We didn’t endorse Obama after Bush bailed out Wall Street in 2008.
We didn’t riot in the streets and set up autonomous zones when it was discovered that your daughter withheld exonerating evidence from the Stalinesque J6 hearings. Any prosecuting attorney who did that in an actual courtroom would have been disbarred. But if you’re a Cheney, you enjoy the same two-tier standards of justice as do the Bidens and Clintons.
But the 2016 primaries were Republican voters’ subtle message to the Republican establishment that, while we supported your garbage candidates and their spineless equivocations for the better part of living memory, we are done with Jeb! and Kasich and whatever other jellyfish RINO candidates cause you to wet your pants with excitement over the possibility of more corporate tax cuts and more illegal immigration.
In 2016, we made our choice, despite your finger-wagging and your Chicken Little fearmongering. And yes, we expected you to “take one for the team,” just like we did in 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012. The fact that you refused to do so spoke volumes not about Trump’s character but about yours.
Because the MINUTE it became clear in 2016 that Trump was our nominee, you turned on us, and with a vengeance. And it had nothing to do with Trump. It had everything to do with the conservative base no longer taking marching orders from the party elite. You showed us then and ever since who you really are and what you really think of us. At least Hillary was honest about it with her “deplorables” remark.
Once broken, trust is almost impossible to recover. And Cheney is the perfect encapsulation of the sneering elite who lose no sleep over the people they betray because they don’t consider those people worthy of a second thought.
The obvious takeaway from this “stunning” endorsement is that it won’t win a single vote for Kamala. It’s not because endorsements from well-known politicians can’t make a difference. They can. It’s that Cheney, due to the sole factor of his lecherous personality, is not a person whose opinions are valued by anybody left, right, or middle.
To the Left, he will always be a war criminal, the “worse-than-Hitler” Cheney holding the short leash of the “slightly-less-bad-Hitler” Bush. To the Right, the stench of his last name now wafts among the sewage of the John Walker Lindhs, Bradley Mannings, and Bowe Bergdahls of American history who slithered off to sleep with the enemy because they didn’t personally agree with the state of our constitutional republic or the decisions of its elected leaders.
Cheney is the guy whose endorsement nobody wants. As a result of this, Cheney gained no allies and only made more enemies. He holds the rare distinction of being one of those figures that both sides detest so much that he unintentionally unifies their concurrence on the bottomlessness of his depravity.
Note to the Left: If you feel compelled to dust off those old “CHENEY IS A WAR CRIMINAL” signs and sick a Soros-funded DA on him, I doubt anyone outside the Lincoln Project and the Bulwark would object. Just putting that out there.
