Last Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney seized the opportunity during a House Armed Services Committee hearing to apologize to Gen. Mark Milley. She went on to assail the ‘despicable’ questioning of her Republican colleagues, who wanted information about phone calls Milley had made to a Chinese official last fall, in which the general had assured him that, were President Trump to launch a nuclear attack against China (presumably out of sheer frustration, or perhaps idle curiosity to learn what the result would be), he would tip him ahead of the fact.
This, of course, was a direct affront to the 70 percent of Wyoming citizens for had voted for Trump in 2020. Several days before that, Cheney had confessed to 60 Minutes that she had been wrong to oppose gay marriage in the past. (About the only people in Wyoming who believe in homosexual weddings are the staffs of the University of Wyoming and the community colleges, a few members of various school boards and assorted social workers.)
Cheney, as vice chairman of the January 6 Committee, continues to bang on about the Capitol riot as if it were the most monstrous thing since Fort Sumter. This despite the fact that it was scarcely more disruptive than the public’s invasion of the White House on Andrew Jackson’s Inauguration Day, and the only person killed, poor Ashli Babbitt, was shot by dead by a Capitol policeman inside the People’s House, which was as much hers as Speaker Pelosi’s and Sandy Cortez’s.
Meanwhile, back in Wyoming, pro-Trump challenger Harriet Hageman is hot on Cheney’s heels in the GOP primary race for Wyoming’s sole congressional seat. Could it be that Cheney is scheming to win the Democratic vote in the Cowboy State? Or even that she is considering switching from the Elephants to the Donkey party? (Wyoming has not had a Democratic House member since Teno Roncalio left office in 1967.)
La Cheney is clearly running scared. Her minions have announced that George W. Bush’s first public act in next year’s fall campaign will be to host a fundraiser for her in Texas. Yet the Bush dynasty is by now what our Central Asian generalissimos are calling ‘over-the-horizon.’ And Wyomingites have a strong prejudice against Texans, whom they view as reckless drivers whose titanic black pickup trucks blast clouds of diesel smoke in their faces while passing them at 95 miles an hour on two-lane roads while poaching more than their fair share of big game animals.
No one here cares how much money the Bushes, or any other foreigners, dump into Cheney’s coffers. Money isn’t going to win this election.
Cheney is persona non grata in Wyoming, and it is too late for her to jump to another lily pad. She is too clumsy a politician to negotiate such a leap anyhow: more likely than not, she would land with a sodden splash in the pond water. Her only hope is that enough candidates enter the field to fracture the vote, permitting her to squeak back into office on a small plurality. Meanwhile, the football stadium at the University of Wyoming a mile from where I am writing this rocks during every home game to voluminous roars of ‘F– JOE BIDEN!’ Cheney protests that she doesn’t care for Joe overmuch, but she certainly seems to prefer him to his predecessor in the White House. He belongs to the same establishment that her father does. Washington has its own version of the Masonic Grip, but Trump doesn’t know it, never wanted to, and doesn’t now.
Wyoming loves Donald Trump. Liz Cheney hasn’t shown her face in these parts in forever. Perhaps she is like a certain organ of the human body in the defiant Mexican drinking chant: ‘The liver does not exist!’
