Reason to Hope

 

There is reason to hope that the "stop the steal" stuff is on the retreat at last, away from the center toward the margin of political discourse in the United States. 

In January, of course, the Republicans lost two critical seats in the U.S. Senate because of an impossibly mixed message to their base, "Your vote doesn't really matter. It will be changed by nasty Dominion voting machines and by the machinations of child-abusing traitors. Yet you ought to get out and vote!" The first part of that overwhelmed the second, the Democrats did get out their vote, and they won both Senate seats from Georgia.

The mixed message wasn't quite as absurd and self-defeating as it seems, though. We have had reason to worry over the intervening months that the message is "elections don't matter in general, they are always a charade, so a military coup wouldn't be such a bad thing -- it would be just a little more honest."

And THAT message is a truly vicious one. So it is a good thing when, as I began, we have reason to hope that it is on the retreat. 

Here are three facts that support hope:

1) The former guy now can't even get Omarosa to shut up. He looks rather pathetic, fighting and losing such battles as this.   

2) His buddies in Arizona have given up on their effort to make believe that he won there. They seem to be saying that Biden's victory was by a slightly larger margin than originally announced. One imagines with delight his impotent fury at this news. "You had ONE JOB! Sneak some bamboo ballots into the piles and then 'discover' them and express shock. How difficult could that have been????" 

3) The top ranks of the U.S. military, god bless them, have been very clear that they will not lend themselves to any military coup. At least not by General Bone Spurs and the trumpeters. 

These and other developments are slowly separating our political bloodstream from the poison. We may survive all of this and get back to something like normal politics yet. 

Which brings me to the lady portrayed above: Liz Cheney. The trumpeters very much want to Show Their Power by getting rid of her. She has now announced a high profile trip to ... New Hampshire. One knows what that means.

She is confident she will keep her seat in the House in 2022, which means I take it both that she believes she will get the necessary votes against any primary challenge (there is no significant Democratic challenge in Wyoming) and that the votes will be fairly-enough counted for that to matter. Further, come what may in 2022, she is prepared to take the offensive and wage a national campaign in 2024. 

I have no interest in seeing a Cheney in the White House. Zero. Zippo. But at the moment this one is doing God's work.

As they say in the Cheney household, "may the road rise up to meet you and may the devil provide you with somebody else's heart when you need it to carry on."