It’s not often someone absolutely destroys their career. Be it in politics, acting, or something normal, descent people do, it’s kind of tough to burn out spectacularly. Ezra Miller, the actor playing the Flash in DC Comics movies, is one example of just how far someone has to go to destroy themselves professionally, and it’s pretty much destroying themselves personally first. Miller could have simply come out as a conservative and it would have had the same effect.
Still, this column is not to lament the downward spiral of Ezra Miller’s short career, it’s to eulogize the career of Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Someone has to.
In all honesty, Cheney was a reliably conservative vote in the House of Representatives. She had a promising career in front of her Republican House leadership, perhaps even a Speakership in her future.
Sadly, like so many in this country over the past few years, Liz Cheney became a victim of a pandemic that swept the country: Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Cheney did not maintain social distance from Democrats and became infected with the anti-social disease that swept the country through the media starting in 2015. While contact tracing hasn’t been able to pinpoint exactly where Cheney became infected – it is believed to have come from either an interview she did with NBC News, when she borrowed hair product from Congressman Jamie Raskin or when she helped try to teach Eric Swalwell how to tie his shoes (it didn’t take) – the case she caught was fatal.
Tomorrow, with the Wyoming primary, Liz Cheney’s infection will finish the job. Republicans will turn her out, deservedly so. Since her infection with TDS, Cheney has been single-minded and damaging to the GOP.
She will be missed…by someone…probably.
In all honesty, Cheney has got to go. Not exclusively because she can’t stand former President Donald Trump, but because she can’t shut up about it. When was the last time you’ve heard her talk about anything other than Donald Trump and how she views him as a “threat to democracy”? It’s been a while, a long while.
Cheney might have survived had she been able to control herself. She never once used her platform to criticize Democrats. Watching her and Chuck Todd seemingly try to one-up each other with their Trump hatred was odd. Never once did Cheney, at least that I saw, turn a press question away from Trump and toward whatever other issues were happening at the time in Congress.
She became single-minded; obsessed, really. That is what killed her career.
As a politician, you have to work with people you personally can’t stand, exactly like the rest of us do. You also have to be able to shut up about something sometimes, to set aside certain things and work for the rest of what you claim to care about. While Cheney still voted with Republicans, her mouth rarely, if ever, stopped talking Trump. Even when she was at a press conference on another issue, she was asked about Trump and couldn’t avoid taking the bait.
She became a useful idiot, willingly.
Scrapping all hope of advancing a conservative agenda, or stopping a liberal one, Cheney threw herself fully into that “useful idiot” role with the January 6th committee hearings.
You can expect Democrats to refuse to ask any skeptical questions, but Cheney was right there with them.
Playing her role, she appeared at those hearings and read her script. Playing ten and fifteen second clips from 10 hours of testimony, Liz Cheney became the chief propagandist for the progressive left.
No critical thinking person could view a one-sided narrative made-for-TV event as fair or interesting, yet that’s where Cheney set up shop.
Her loss tomorrow is one of the most well-earned losses in political history. If she had wanted to flame out in the most spectacular way possible, it’s difficult to think of what she could have done differently.
Liz Cheney went to Congress with a bunch of promise and a last name that gave her a lot of goodwill with conservatives. She’ll leave it like a drunk being asked to leave a restaurant – loudly trying to do as much damage as possible as she walks toward the door. She will not be missed.