Another Liz Cheney post - What the sellout buys you...(Long)

Just look at this article by the rag who promises ominously - 'Democracy dies in darkness'.

JACKSON, Wyo. — The two-minute video, meant ostensibly as the closing appeal to voters here, likely served much more as the launching point of a campaign that will last for years to come.

“No matter how long we must fight, this is a battle we will win,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) says to the camera, promising to lead “millions of Americans” of all ideological stripes “united in the cause of freedom.”

“This is our great task and we will prevail. I hope you will join me in this fight,” Cheney concludes.

Cheney is looking far beyond Tuesday’s Republican primary for this state’s at-large seat in the U.S. House, a race that she is likely to lose, barring an unprecedented surge of non-Republican voters into the GOP contest.

She entered Congress six years ago as a relative celebrity, the daughter of the former vice president who spent several years using Fox News appearances to deliver acid-tongued critiques of the Obama-Biden administration. And she will exit the Capitol, likely in 4½ months, as the face of an anti-Trump movement that has cost her old alliances but left her with new supporters, clamoring for a next act more nationally focused.

“I sure hope she runs for president,” Jim Rooks, elected to Jackson’s town council as a self-proclaimed “fierce independent,” said while sitting in a coffee shop looking up at Snow King Mountain.

Cheney has fielded questions about her ambitions since first taking office, but the intensity ramped up after this summer’s blockbuster hearings, in which she has served as vice chairwoman of the committee investigating the ex-president’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Untied States Capitol.

“I’ll make a decision on 2024 down the road,” she told CNN in late July.

But Cheney is clear-eyed when it comes to her chances of actually winning the presidential nomination in a party that is still so loyal to former president Donald Trump, according to friends and advisers. She sees her future role similar to how she views the work of the Jan. 6 committee: Blocking any path for Trump back to the Oval Office.

“It’s about the danger that he poses to the country, and that he can’t be anywhere close to that power again,” she told a crowd of supporters in Cheyenne just before the committee hearings launched in early June.

Traditional conservatives opposed to Trump have already discussed the possibility of Cheney running for the White House. “That chatter was very strong even before that Dick Cheney commercial,” Dmitri Mehlhorn said, referring to a campaign ad that ran nationwide on Fox News and featured the former vice president denouncing Trump.

Mehlhorn advises several donors across the political spectrum who are opposed to Trump, including the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. Most are ready to provide critical financing for a Cheney bid.

In that regard, Cheney will spend the months after the committee concludes its work later this year figuring out her next steps. That might be launching a political organization that focuses on Trump, or some think-tank work matched with media appearances.

But, for certain, Cheney and a small but influential bloc of anti-Trump Republicans have decided that there must be a 2024 candidate who will run as an unabashed opponent of both the ex-president and other contenders who spew his mistruths about the 2020 election.

This anti-Trump group fears a repeat of the 2016 campaign, in which rivals refrained from attacking Trump’s unorthodox behavior and positions until it was too late. The emerging 2024 Republican presidential field consists of the former president, his allies looking to emulate him and a collection of other Republicans courting non-Trump voters but without forcefully denouncing Trump.

Cheney and her crowd want a candidate who would serve merely as a political kamikaze, blowing up his or her candidacy but also taking down Trump.

“You need that. I think it’s got to be somebody that’s willing to take the boos, take the yells,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), the only other Republican on the Jan. 6 committee, said in a recent interview. “Somebody [who] can stand on the stage and just tell people the truth, I think that would have a huge impact.”

Mehlhorn said his team of anti-Trump donors would take a Cheney campaign, designed solely to attack Trump, “seriously” enough that they could put at least $20 million behind it.

That way, he said, “Republican voters are reminded of how bad Trump is in a way that might allow someone else to emerge from the primary.”

The price of opposition

Cheney has been very outspoken in her denunciations of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other Republicans who have remained loyal to Trump despite his help precipitating the Capitol attack.

But she has also been upset with a separate group of Republicans who despise Trump but instead hope the ex-president will just fade away, particularly Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“Where Kevin is like full-on public embrace, McConnell is: Ignore and hope he goes away. And that just doesn’t work,” Cheney told the authors of “This Will Not Pass,” a book about the fallout of the 2020 election.

But Cheney’s singular focus on preventing Trump from being reelected has come at a heavy cost. Her political world has turned upside down.

(continued in next post)