August 18, 2022

By JP Sottile

Wyoming established itself as the Death Star of American politics by launching the career of Darth Cheney in 1979 and dutifully reelecting the future villain for a decade. Then, after Darth Cheney brazenly blew up the bystander nation of Iraq a decade later, the half-million voters of Wyoming (yup, that's all there is ... AND they get two oily and very gassy Senators, to boot!) actually went ahead and doubled-down by overwhelmingly electing and reelecting Darth's daughter ... twice.

That's despite or, sadder still, maybe in spite of the fact that Darth's daughter served in Daddy's Death Star Administration (I mean, technically it was W's administration, but, you know...) in the State Department and, specifically, in the Near Eastern division of the State Department. There was a lot of "action" in that division when she served there in various roles. She's probably still got some dried blood under her fingernails.

All of that was enough to question the rationality, even the sanity of Wyoming's voters who, it seems, embraced the Dark Side as a matter of pride. One might even wonder what's in the water up there, besides Halliburton's top secret fracking chemical cocktail.

But then came Trump, who trashed W and the Iraq War and Jeb and Darth Cheney ... meaning everything they voted for over the course of decades ... and they embraced him like they were having a panic attack on a roller coaster. But Darth's daughter didn't. She actually embraced reality and, in a Leia-like move (compared to most of her Republican colleagues, that is), she chose the truth about Trump over preserving her position. And now the people who thought Wyoming's voters were crazy for giving succor to the Darth Cheney family are now lamenting Liz's loss and quite understandably shaking their heads at the sad fact that they've chosen to punish her in the primary for transgressing a proven liar and moral reprobate, which is ironic because those are "qualities" many of those selfsame head-shakers long associated with her father.

I guess that means the only real consistency here is the questionable judgment of voters in Wyoming, who've gone from the smarmy self-interest of voting for a war-mongering family that's been committed to unregulated resource extraction in a state replete with minerals and hydrocarbons and still-unspoiled natural beauty ... to a delusional, authoritarian embrace of a make-up addicted reality game show host whose profuse lies travel around the body politic like an aggressive cancer. And, in so doing, they've illustrated the depth and breadth of the feverish sickness now threatening to overtake the patient.

Editor’s Note: Darth Cheney taped a campaign ad for his daughter in which he called Trump a coward, not a real man, and a threat to the republic. Liz Cheney knows she may be standing up for democracy and the Constitution, but she is also a key player in protecting the reputation, such as it is, of the Cheney dynasty.

Heather Cox Richardson noted yesterday that:

“Last night, my father killed another political dynasty, and that’s the Cheneys. He first killed the Bushes, then he killed the Clintons. Last night he killed the Cheneys.” So Eric Trump, former president Donald Trump’s son, interpreted the primary loss by Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) last night.

All that murderous rhetoric that Eric Trump evokes reminds you that the countless deaths from the Cheney-Bush “Forever Wars” was not that long ago, and Liz Cheney, as laudable as her defense of democracy may be, was neck deep in it.