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Well, quite a bit, actually. If someone doesn’t know which one of the Cheneys is actually running for the office, it’s a tip-off that they really don’t know jack about this race.

Come on.

Your criticisms of Liz Cheney about other issues rather than a confusion of similar names are points well taken. That, however, is not the objection to Liz Cheney which was raised, she was dismissed because she was "supporting" homosexual marriage and that objection was addressed.

As to the issues which you list "like land management issues with the BLM and USFS, oil/gas/coal leases, coal mining regs, air quality regs that will impact coal sales, alternative energy scams that are cluttering our skies with stupid bird cuisinarts, economic and trade policies", these are matters of perennial concern in Wyoming as I know as a former property owner in that state.

But I am also aware that there is a saying out there that goes like this, definition of a developer: someone who wants to build a cabin in the woods; definition of an environmentalist: someone who built his cabin last year. And that brings up the tension between state and federal which really means the tension between rural and city, between West and East, between residents and tourists and, ultimately, between the teeming masses and rugged individualism.

Those same conservatives in Wyoming who object to federal intrusion into their state do not connect that intrusion with an inevitability that arises out of exploding population in the United States. Population of America has more than doubled in my lifetime. The teeming regions of the East are not going to be denied access to the wilderness of the West, or, under another administration, to its minerals, which are rendered so accessible with modern technology.

As a conservative, I support Wyoming in its battle against the feds. But as a non-resident of Wyoming, my interests in its Senatorial race lie elsewhere. Today every Senator, and to a lesser extent every congressman, is a national politician. Just as Wyoming is fighting federalism for its very existence, so the rest of the nation is being transformed as the original constitutional federal system has been virtually swept away. That means that a senator from Wyoming affects me just as much, or nearly as much, as a senator from my home state because most of the stuff that comes out of Washington is national in application.

Under these circumstances, carpetbagger criticisms have become archaic and irrelevant. They are probably still more relevant in Wyoming then they were in New York when Hillary Clinton unpacked her carpetbag there but as far as I'm concerned a vote in the Senate when cast by a Rino is a vote against me, regardless of its state of origin.

As someone who is no longer a property owner in Wyoming, my perspective is as I have described. If Liz Cheney cannot hold her own in debates concerning Wyoming issues, the voters will decide. My objection, and my interests in this race, are that on the national scene we are played by Rino Republicans in the Senate and elsewhere and if we can put the fear of God in the rest of these senators, as we have done in Utah and Texas, for example, we just might encourage the rest.

We actually do connect these issues to the explosion in population in the US.

The problem is, the national GOP leadership is hell-bent on making illegal aliens legit.

Mike Enzi has consistently voted against this policy. Liz Cheney is playing a cagey game on this issue. My suspicion is that she’s allied with the likes of Bill Kristol, and therefore pro-immigration. The neo-cons are, have been and will continue to be pro-immigration, because they’re convinced (through the use of drugs or being dropped on their heads as children) that Mexicans are somehow congenitally conservative - all evidence to the contrary.

Mike Enzi has a solid track record on the current (and past) immigration issues: He refused to be sucked into the “let’s vote to bring in millions of Mexican illegals because we hope they vote GOP” nonsense.

Lizzie Cheney? Yea, she’s very hard to pin down on this issue. Again, she talks in these broad, fuzzy generalities. But a person is known by the company they keep, and the people orbiting Cheney are pro-amnesty.

And, on the “they’re known by the company they keep” issue:

How is it that anyone can do a thorough background analysis of Cheney and her husband and come to the the conclusion that she will be anything BUT a RINO?

This is what I really fail to understand. Where do people get the idea that Liz Cheney is a “conservative?” From what action, issue or group of associates does anyone have ANY evidence to support this assertion?

That is what annoys me most about Cheney supporters. They think that Enzi isn’t bold enough. They think that Enzi isn’t “conservative enough.”

Oooookay. Compared to a handful of other people in the Senate, that might be true. On the average, Enzi is pretty conservative - more than average for the GOP caucus in the US Senate. He’s not a guy who likes getting on camera that much. He’s not a bomb-thrower. He’s not about to get on Hannity or Limbaugh’s show and start riling up the masses for or against anything. It just isn’t his style.

But the important question here in an election year is this: If we replace an incumbent, are we going to be making the US Senate more conservative? If that answer isn’t “yes,” then I don’t care how much time a candidate spends throwing themselves in front of a TV camera or making attention-grabbing pontifications. I want to see conservative votes and conservative legislation.

I utterly fail to see any evidence of “true” conservative epistemology in Liz Cheney. By looking at the people who she associates with, the actions and affiliations of her husband, her financial backers, the positions she’s taken in the “Keep America Safe” group that’s gone mostly dark since she started this idea of running for Senate here in Wyoming... she shows no more conservative ideals than some of the more infamous RINOs in the Senate now.

Let’s have a little look at Phillip Perry, Cheney’s husband.

First, let’s have a little spin backwards in time:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16318-2005Mar31.html

Money quote:

“In Bush’s first term in office, Perry was general counsel to the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he helped draft the 2002 legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security.”

Right there, that’s a complete disqualification for any GOP candidate IMO - to have been involved even at arm’s length with the creation of the DHS is a fundamental disqualification.

Go do digging on Phillip Perry. You’ll find out who and what Cheney is, because she found this clown interesting enough to bear him five children. I want no candidate who has someone like Perry for a spouse in office. Every time we have a “power couple” like this in DC, with one in the senate and the other one pulling levers at a law or think-tank in DC, we common people get shafted.