Liz Cheney Dropping Out of Primary

CNN Email

[BulletBobCo]

First on CNN: Liz Cheney, whose bid to unseat Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi sparked a round of warfare in the Republican Party and even within her own family, is dropping out of the Senate primary, sources told CNN's John King.

Cheney, the eldest daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, began telling associates of her decision over the weekend and could make an announcement about the race as early as Monday.

[BillyBoy]

Now the media will be forced to stop pretending this is one of the “Top 5 most hotly contested Senate races of 2014” (Liz Cheney was consistently down by 30 points but they kept pushing that meme)

[gleeaikin]

It’s her sister who is gay, right?

[BillyBoy]

>> How many times, beginning with my very first reply, do I have to make it explicitly clear that my judgment was not based on her conservatism? <<

I have no doubt that support for dumping Enzi wasn't based on Liz Cheney's conservativism. Even the most gung-ho Liz supporters here gave up trying to sell as a "true conservative" a few weeks after she announced her candidacy and her record was exposed. Instead, they'd just constantly demonize Enzi. It got to the point that many of them wouldn't even ADMIT she was running.

I'm pretty their judgment that "Enzi Must Go" came from this:

HIS HOLINESS THE LEVIN HAS SPOKEN!!!

PRAISE HIM!!!

[GeronL]

I never thought I would see FReepers (not naming names, wouldn't be prudent) coming very close to saying "Yes, this candidate is very likely lying to our faces about some basic principles and values but that's okay the other guy is boring"

Democrats expect their candidates to lie every time they breathe, conservatives want to hear candidates who actually believe in conservatism. Crazy, right?

[gleeaikin]

Do they believe in making lots of money for Halliburton?

[Gene Eric]

The Great One!

[jjsheridan5]

Evidently we are talking at cross purposes on at least two levels.

First, I have made it clear for my very first reply and for about four or five replies thereafter that my judgment was not based on Liz Cheney's conservative bona fidesin or whether she was more or less conservative than Enzi. You want me to apply a test which is a nice test, in ordinary times and in ordinary races an essential test. My point is different.

Second, I have no complaint against Mike Enzi as measured against the rest of the Republican herd in the Senate. My complaint is with the herd of whom Mike Enzi is one. It's time to cull the herd. If Enzi cannot perform up to the level required in these times, he is simply expendable.

What do the times call for? For someone to kick over the table and start over. We had our Republican majorities under Bush and the likes of Mike Enzi and the rest of them simply reduced the rate of acceleration towards calamity. That will not do. The country is hurtling toward disaster. If Liz Cheney were elected and did not throw bombs, fire her and get somebody who will! Enzi has proven he will not.

This is not a question of social conservatism-I don't give a damn who is corn-holing whom in the privacy of their own homes or who is marrying whom of the same sex. That battle has been lost. The Supreme Court has ruled on the right to sodomize your neighbor in private. Many states have agreed with the right to marry and in those which have not have granted gays contractual rights which amount to the equivalent. The fight is over. We are now about to lose the country. We are driving headlong for the cliff while fixated by the image of copulating gays in the rearview mirror.

Anyone who votes for Mike Enzi because he is opposed to homosexuality is rearranging the deck chairs on The Ship of Fools. The point is not whether I find homosexuality repugnant, I do, the point is now to try to save the country.

Senator Enzi is part of the problem because he is not part of the solution. What has he done from perhaps the safest seat in the country to save the country? Compare him to Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and you see the model for what we have to have. Mike Enzi is a placeholder, no worse and perhaps a lot better than the rest of them, but we simply cannot afford to waste his place.

What a great post. Unfortunately, many seem to have difficulty understanding it, and that does not bode well.

The only thing that you have said in this thread that I would take issue with is that this has any impact, or predictive value, on the major primaries throughout the south. Wyoming was a little bit of an exception: a decent conservative, who fails to appreciate the gravity of the situation this country is in (and especially the role played by nominal allies in the Republican party), versus someone for whom there is legitimate doubt (not just about her positions, but also her motivations).

This primary just seemed like the "one" in "one of these is not like the others".

[ansel12]

Her Father was Secretary of Defense, that is about as high as you can go in the Military

Please, that isn't serving in the military, nor is being Commander in Chief, Clinton, and Obama, and Cheney are not now, veterans.

[ansel12]

We understood him, and we disagree.

Moving left is wrong.

[9YearLurker]

Liz Cheney was as GOPe as they come in her positions. By comparison, Enzi is a conservative stalwart. Amnesty is a good example of this.

That so many Freepers got taken in by her ‘shake things up’ message is unfortunate. She should have run in VA where her politics are a fit and she could have added to the cause in Congress. Now she would have much less chance of succeeding there.

That’s a shame, but her failure in WY is a good thing for tea party insurgents, because she would have been just one more example of an Establishment player who slipped in mouthing the tea party line. It is a good thing IMO that that didn’t happen. “Shaking things up” by trying to bigfoot over a good footsoldier as a (figuratively) former general’s daughter is not the shaking up we need.

[NVDave]

No she didn’t.

The idea that she was going to be some sort of “outsider” is laughable to anyone who has done their homework on Lizzy.

I just got a campaign mailer from her. Funny thing: There’s a pic of her with one of her kids... but no husband. Why?

Because when you start digging into who her husband is, you come to see she’s one half of one of the ultimate DC insider power couples. Her hubby has written some truly horrible legislation for the Congress to pass, including lots of the idiotic nonsense for the TSA and Homeland Insecurity.

From my perspective as a Wyoming resident and voter, my reaction is “good riddance to bad rubbish.”

[NVDave]

Exactly. The only people who are going to be crying in their beer are the neo-cons who want to send out treasure and blood to die for the causes of Israel and their lobby in DC.

If Jews in the US are so concerned with the future of Israel, then American Jews can contribute money and blood to the future of Israel first, and if they run out, then they can come looking for assistance.

[NVDave]

OK, I believe I’ve spelled this out for you before. I’ll spell it out for you again.

Such a person (a bomb-thrower, as you term them) will not get elected in Wyoming. It isn’t going to happen, thanks for playing. That’s not what people elect in politicians at a local, state or federal level around here. It just isn’t going to happen at any level.

If Lizzy had been positioning herself as a bomb-thrower, she would have lost. Sure, that stuff sells well on Hannity’s program to the audience of people who are as dim as Hannity, it might sell in Texas, but it doesn’t sell here in Wyoming. Ted Cruz probably couldn’t win an election here in Wyoming unless he’s running against a red-diaper baby from NYC.

This is the state that likes quiet competence, not braggarts and blowhards. Enzi has been serving at various levels of political office for a long time in the state, and has been mayor of Gillette, which means he knows the coal issues, knows the CEO’s of the huge mines out there in Campbell County on a first-name basis.

Lizzy running around Wyoming claiming she was “concerned” about Obama’s war on coal was amusing. This is a woman who has probably never seen the inside of a coal mine and had obviously been fed a number of position papers from some DC think-tank on the issue. That coal severance tax revenue is a Big Friggin’ Deal to this state, and people in the state aren’t about to put a rank amateur into the US Senate who knows only what some bunch of dim-bulb academics from a DC think tank have told her about Powder River Basin coal.

Lizzy’s mission was thus: Get elected to a safe GOP seat to secure another seat in the US Senate for the Israel lobby. That’s it. That’s what she loved to flap her soup-cooler about: Foreign policy. Wanna know what voters in Wyoming don’t give a ripe fig about any more? Foreign policy, especially in the Ivy League disaster zone popularly known as “The Middle East.”

[Candor7]

Put in a real conservative for the primary.

[stilloftyhenight]

Glad to read this. Liz Cheney is the very definition of RINO. Remember her foreign service? I do.

[nathanbedford]

Dave, I know we have had an exchange on this before and I take quite seriously every fact that you outline in your reply concerning the unfitness of Liz Cheney to represent the peculiar interests of Wyoming. I do not for one second fault the people of Wyoming for voting their interests, when those interests are conservative interests and do not conflict with the national good.

In our previous exchange I outline my thinking about Senatorial offices in America today. In short, Chuck Schumer does as much harm to the people of Wyoming as he does to the people of New York. In other words, the federal government intrudes on every area of everyone's life and a senator is not limited in the scope of the good or the harm that he can do to the state which he "represents."

By way of coincidence, Mark Levin was on C-SPAN last night speaking about the need to restore the election of senators to the state legislatures so that the balance of power in the federal system could be restored to the states. While senators are only notionally representatives of their state, at least as far as the application of their power rather than the source of their powers is concerned, every American should be acutely interested in every Senate race.

Therefore, my observations concerning Liz Cheney have a selfish perspective, just as those who vote their own mining interests in Wyoming have a selfish perspective, I want a conservative movement to stop what is happening in America and to America. I think you've probably seen my other posts on this thread to that effect (see reply #63).

If you take a look at jjsheridan5's post (# 107) you will see him express the opinion that Liz Cheney has lost out in Wyoming for reasons that do not apply to the southern states, presumably South Carolina and Tennessee etc. This may surprise you, but I hope that is the case because I do not want to see come to pass what I expressed in my first reply in this thread that her defeat presages a series of failures by the tea party to reform the establishment of the Republican Party. I would much prefer that the reasons for Lynn Cheney's defeat are peculiar to Wyoming and to her and her husband personally, rather than representative of the national sentiment.

I certainly hope that we don't hear from voters in Tennessee and South Carolina about how their peculiar interests mean that they should return Alexander and Graham to the United States Senate. Similarly, I hope we do not learn that Cheney's failures come from a national mood sustaining the establishment and further that they do not come from a failure to raise money on the national level which has been denied her and diverted to Senator Enzi by Karl Rove.

[Gene Eric]

>> peculiar interests

e.g., Arizona’s McCain...

You’re right. It’s not exactly local notwithstanding your axiom concerning racial politics...

[nathanbedford]

By way of addendum to my last to you and as a submission for the record: I am very much in your camp concerning any neocon tendencies by any United States senator. That skepticism about Cheney is certainly warranted considering her father's history.

I have posts going back perhaps 10 years to the effect that the United States should disengage its foreign policy from Israel. I do not understand why we think it in our national interest to align ourselves with a few million Israelis against hundreds of millions of Arabs with so much oil.

To avoid the charge of anti-Semitism and indifference to the fate of our ally, I suggested that we offer citizenship to every Israeli who wants it but that we do not commit ourselves to war on Israel's terms. Having said that, I note that at present our interests seem to be congruent with Israel's in stopping Iran from getting the bomb but that is now a moot issue because if the Israelis don't stop Iran, Obama certainly will not.

Israel is on its own concerning the bomb now.

[nathanbedford]

The left has nationalized virtually all policy in America and it has done so with the help of injecting race into elections wherever possible.

It's interesting to note that racial demographics in Wyoming permit that to be a conservative state. Racial demographics in Rhode Island, as a contrary example, impel that state toward leftism.

I appreciate your comments on this thread.

[ZULU]

Your opinion appears to be the right one to me.