Tag: Liz Cheney

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Tabloid Party

Remember “supermarket tabloids”? They were called that because when you stood in the checkout line at the grocery store, you were invariably confronted with a rack of newspapers featuring headlines such as: “HILLARY CLINTON ADOPTS ALIEN BABY!” Or, “BIGFOOT KEPT LUMBERJACK AS SEX SLAVE!” Or, “DICK CHENEY IS A ROBOT!” (All actual headlines, by the way.)

There was the Star, the Weekly World News, The Sun, and, of course, the still extant National Enquirer, most recently famous for burying stories about former President Trump’s extramarital liaisons.

I like to think most people who saw these tabloids in the checkout line back then were like me — they chuckled, rolled their eyes, maybe even bought a copy of a particularly outrageous issue ironically, thinking “Who the hell would believe this?”

But the tabloids sold millions of copies a week in their prime, and they weren’t all being purchased ironically. Some people bought tabloids because they wanted to know exactly how a “174-MPH Sneeze Blows Off Woman’s Hair,” or details about the “FBI Captur[ing] Bat Child,” or the woman who claimed “I Had Bigfoot’s Baby.”

We used to think the kind of people who believed tabloid stories were unsophisticated rubes who didn’t know any better. It wasn’t a big problem. If some goober in Horn Lake believed that Hillary Clinton adopted an alien baby, what was the harm, really? Morons gonna moron. We’ve come a long way from that sort of lunacy.

Oh wait, no we haven’t. Countless numbers of QAnon faithful believe Hillary Clinton and Anderson Cooper (and many others) are involved in a cannibalistic pedophilic sex-slavery ring. I guess for Hillary it probably all started with that alien baby.

It would be funny, except that most Republicans are now basically members of the “Tabloid Party,” because what is the QAnon conspiracy if not a gory tabloid fantasy writ large? Let’s review: A cabal of cannibalistic satan-worshipping pedophiles (cool band name) — including Democratic politicians, media moguls, and bankers (short-hand for Jews), journalists, and other powerful government figures — control the “deep state” and thereby rule the country. And remember, they eat babies. Let that sink in. Thousands of people believe this shit. Which is terrifying.

The QAnon conspiracy further alleges that a battle between good and evil is raging and that Donald Trump was sent to turn the tide for good. “Q” himself is deep within the deep state, giving cryptic clues to the faithful and orchestrating two great upcoming events: The Storm (mass arrests of the deep state evil-doers) and The Great Awakening, in which all will be revealed and made obvious to non-believers — and Donald Trump will return to his rightful place as president of our great and noble land. (Trump, by the way, is supposed to be sworn in on March 4th. Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., has tripled its rates for that night. Look it up. Used to be that morons just bought tabloids. Now they book $1,000 hotel rooms.)

This is all insane, right? Surely, most sentient beings can agree on this.

I mean, except for most Republicans in Congress, who gave freshman Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene a standing ovation after she slightly backed off a couple of her more controversial QAnon-related remarks. Among her many outrages, Greene has denied 9/11 happened, called several mass shootings “false flag operations” and berated one of the students at Parkland High School as a “coward,” claimed Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in numerous murders, including that of John F. Kennedy Jr., and alleged that Jews in the banking business used lasers from space satellites to start last summer’s California forest fires. I could go on, but I’d run out of space. Greene is a walking, talking issue of Weekly World News, only more dangerous. She’s racist and vile, and frankly, nuts.

And yet, only 11 Republicans in Congress had the courage to vote for removing Greene from her committee positions last week. Only Liz Cheney had the guts to forcefully speak out against this madness.

And her father’s a robot.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Dick and Liz Cheney

The last time Liz and Dick created this much fuss in the press, it was on the set of Cleopatra, back in the 1950s. I wish I were speaking of Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, but unfortunately, I’m referring to former Vice President “Deadeye” Dick Cheney and his mind-melded daughter, Fox News contributor and failed Senate candidate, Liz Cheney.

The Cheneys “co-authored” an editorial in the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal called “The Collapsing Obama Doctrine,” in which they stated, “rarely has a U.S. President been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.” I don’t often read the WSJ since I lost my money in the Bush Recession, but when I read that particular sentence, I had to lean back in my chair and take a few deep breaths at the deaf, dumb, and blind hypocrisy of the head designer and chief promoter of the Iraq War.

Even Fox News’ Megyn Kelly seemed incredulous during an interview on a network that’s usually obsequious to Liz and her dad. When Cheney was asked if the same question might be directed at him after such previous statements as “we would be regarded as liberators in Iraq,” and “the insurgency is in its last throes,” he replied without a trace of shame: “We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement with weapons of mass destruction. We did the right thing.”

No doubt in anybody’s mind? There was doubt in everybody’s mind who could see through Dick Cheney’s master plan to march this country into an unnecessary war. Now that American troops are gone and Iraq is dissolving into chaos, Cheney, along with his personal bad seed, is trying to deflect blame everyplace but where it belongs: in his bloody hands.

He lashed out against fellow Republican Rand Paul for stating that trying to blame Obama for the Iraq disaster was misdirected, and blasted Bill Clinton for whatever reason he could come up with. The Cheneys contended, “On a trip to the Middle East … we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel: ‘Can you explain why your president is doing this? … Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard-fought gains you secured in Iraq?’ Liz and Dick continued, “Mr. Obama … abandoned Iraq, and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.”

One shabby, lazy, old journalistic trick when you wish to forward an opinion but can’t get anyone to speak on the record is to write, “Some people say,” or, “It has been stated in certain quarters.” This allows you to imply defamatory quotes made toward your intended target without actually quoting anyone. It says as much about the Cheneys’ deception as it does about how corrupt the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial department has become under the ownership of NewsCorp.

Does anyone who was awake for the past six years believe that the Bush administration handed Obama a victory in Iraq? This evil war has cost 4,500 American lives, trillions of dollars, and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, yet Cheney still considers it “the right thing to do”? The WSJ “take your daughter to work day” editorial continues: “Despite the threat to America unfolding across the Middle East, aided by his abandonment of Iraq, he (Obama) has announced he intends to follow the same policy in Afghanistan.”

If memory serves, Obama won election and reelection on the pledge that he would put an end to the Bush wars. In Cheney’s eyes, victory in Iraq means a pliable puppet government and a permanent U.S. military presence to safeguard the oilfields that were supposed to pay for his misbegotten war. Cheney declares, “Al qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent and they present a security threat not seen since the Cold War,” with the same assurance that he proclaimed, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”  

Many pundits on the right still take Cheney seriously, but he’s lost Glen Beck. On his radio show, the cherubic prophet of the apocalypse proclaimed: “Liberals said, ‘We shouldn’t get involved, we shouldn’t nation build.’ They said we couldn’t force freedom on people … You are right, Liberals, you were right.”

Fox News gave the Cheneys a second joint interview, perhaps to assuage hurt feelings caused by Megyn Kelly, only this time it was to announce the formation of The Alliance for a Strong America, a grassroots organization founded, according to Liz, “because we know America’s security depends upon our ability to reverse President Obama’s policies.” While Liz dressed in all black, Dick sported a white cowboy hat and an oilskin vest, causing them to appear more like American Gothic than Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. All that was missing was the pitchfork.

Speaking from Wyoming, where Liz steamrolled her own sister while cozying up to the ultra-right in her losing Senate bid, the new Cheney “alliance” looked more like an attempt to shore-up Liz’s rabid-conservative bona fides for another run for Congress. Cheney claimed the group’s purpose is “to restore America’s power and preeminence” in the world. “President Obama has repeatedly misled the American people about the attacks in Benghazi and the true nature of the threat we face.”

Oh. I get it now. Benghazi. This is about fund-raising for the next election. “Benghazi” is like catnip for right wing pussies, and I mean that strictly in the “fat cat” political contributor sense of the word. But when it comes to Liz Cheney’s credibility, this silly drama can’t come close to matching a Shakespearean production co-starring Liz and Dick that I would much prefer seeing: The Taming of the Shrew.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From The Editor: Fords and Cheneys

It was a good week for schadenfreude, which, literally translated from the German, means “harm-joy” and as commonly used in English, means taking pleasure from the pain of others.

Who in Memphis, for example, isn’t taking a little pleasure from the pain, or at least embarrassment, that Toronto is suffering from the public antics of its inflatable, pumpkin-headed mayor, Rob Ford. Ford, who has admitted to smoking crack and whose behavior in various press conferences and council meetings indicates that he’s still hitting the pipe, has become a household name and the target of Saturday Night Live skits and late-night comedians. (The late Chris Farley must be writhing in his grave at the missed opportunity to mimic the man he was born to mimic.)

At any rate, Rob Ford’s behavior makes the Nashville perorations of Memphis’ Ophelia Ford (no relation, except spiritual) look tame, indeed. When Toronto’s city council moved to limit Ford’s powers, he likened the move to the U.S. invasion of Kuwait. He also cussed out the press and inadvertently tackled a female councilwoman in one of the most weirdly hilarious videos to ever hit the internet. He then went on the Today show and told host Matt Lauer that he had a “weight issue” that he was getting treatment for and that he wasn’t going anywhere. “They’re not going to find another Rob Ford,” he said, which is pretty much irrefutable.

And speaking of schadenfreude, how about Liz and Mary, the battlin’ Cheney daughters? Liz, the elder sibling, who sports a blond bouffant hairdone, looks a lot like her mother, Lynne Cheney. Mary looks more like Dick. (Please, please, forgive me.) Anyway, Liz, who is straight, recently moved to Wyoming from Washington, D.C., in order to launch a primary challenge to incumbent Republican senator Mike Enzi. To assuage concerns that she might somehow be perceived as “progressive” by the Tea Party wing that dominates the GOP in Wyoming, Liz took a stand against gay marriage. This did not sit well with sister Mary, who is gay and legally married to a woman named Heather Poe.

Mary issued several statements castigating Liz, first asserting that her sister had often visited her family and had never had a problem accepting her marriage to Heather, then later issuing a statement saying her sister was on “the wrong side of history.” Mary, of course, conveniently neglected to mention her own history, which includes working to elect and re-elect numerous Republicans who not only opposed gay marriage but even opposed gay rights.

Father Dick Cheney then stepped up in support of Liz, even though he himself has come out in favor of gay marriage — in essence, choosing politics over his own ethical beliefs. Big surprise, I know. But it does assure that the Cheney family Christmas will be a little tense this year.

Merry Schadenfreude, y’all!

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com