Credibility Matters

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Credibility matters, especially to Republicans.

    Now, to anyone who'd read this byline or blog since its earliest days at the end of the Bush administration, this may seem like a radical departure for someone who'd been lambasted by right wing pundits as "a radical, left wing nut job." Liz Cheney, whose father once told Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself, combined with the word "credibility"?

     Yet, as the Bulwark's co-founder Charlie Sykes points out in his newest article, it was the very conservative credibility that Liz Cheney brings to the table that made her, along with Adam Kinzinger, such a fat. juicy target for the RNC during their Nuremberg hate rally in Salt Lake City. The decision to censure Liz Cheney, who'd already lost her chairwomanship that had made her the #3 Republican in the House, seemed to be the only reason for the convention. This is the money shot of Sykes' article:

"Cheney and Kinzinger, it says, 'are both utilizing their past professed political affiliations to mask Democratic abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.' In other words, the problem is not disloyalty, it is credibility. As Republicans, they provide bipartisan credibility to the Jan. 6 committee’s investigations. This is the crucial context for Friday’s RNC vote — a desperate anxiety about the danger that the committee poses to Trump world, and the role that Cheney and Kinzinger will play as members of that committee."

     Right winger or not, Sykes has his finger right on the pulse of the problem the RNC thinks it has with Cheney (and Kinzinger). It's not as if they're hacks and apostates, RINOs as Trump loves to call them. It's the fact that both lawmakers bring a certain gravitas to the J6 Committee, Cheney, especially, because she's the daughter of snarling neocon Dick Cheney and Vice Chair of the committee investigating what happened before and during January 6th. The RNC's sole reason for meeting in Salt Lake City, this was velcroed to the resolution: their laughable belief that the committee engaged in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” Except that the J6 Committee isn't as interested in the law-hanging fruit, which are the rioters, but the white collar criminals who'd enabled or even aided and abetted the rioters in their failed sacking of the Capitol that day.

     Hopefully, February 4, 2022 will be known as the day the RNC and the GOP in general dropped any pretensions of being a legitimate political party and one that stands for insurrection and homicidal violence if they don't get their way in future elections. It was not a way for them to continue carrying Trump's rancid water, they were carrying their own. They went all in days after January 6th and, as the saying goes, "In for a penny, in for a pound." And one can always count on Republicans to double down on even the stupidest and worst calls with the psychopathic and intractable tenacity of a Major League umpire.

The Morning After

That was Friday. By Saturday, Mitt Romney's meat-headed niece Ronna Romney McDaniel had to hastily issue talking points to the other RNC members instructing them to walk back their "legitimate political discourse" line to exclude those who were actually rioting at the Capitol, wink wink, nod nod. Nonetheless, it led McDaniels' uncle, Senator Mitt Romney, to denounce in no uncertain terms his niece's RNC's decision to censure Kinzinger and Cheney as well as elevate and legitimize anyone who was at the Capitol that day as legitimate citizens engaging in "legitimate political discourse."

     In other words, the RNC's inexplicable decision to go full tilt fascist wasn't merely a matter of ensuring party purity and purging from its ranks all apostates but in ensuring that its impurity remained intact by purging non-compliant members of their caucus because of their credibility (Cheney's the daughter of Dick Cheney and Kinzinger is a war hero).

     One can only imagine what their hoary old Saint Ronald Reagan, he who once famously said that the 11th Commandment was, "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican" would say about their censure vote.

    To be fair, not all Republicans were thrilled with the RNC or Trump, for that matter, after the censure vote. In an almost equally laughable turn of events, Republicans goosestepped their way to Salt Lake City thinking they had a winning message in downplaying the Biden Administration's accomplishments in its first year without advancing any serious and substantive policy alternatives. 

   The obsessive focus on Trump and vainly trying to negotiate their way around Trump's ever-changing mine field is part and parcel with their 2020 analogue who couldn't muster a more substantial convention platform than to say, "Rah Rah Sis Boom Bah" for Donald Trump, a man who doesn't recognize the fact that loyalty is reciprocal and that to get a little, you have to give a little.

    The RNC's censure vote came right after Mike Pence spoke at the Federalist Society and offered a weak-kneed denunciation of Trump's belief that the Vice President had the Constitutional power to overturn the election or send it back to the states. It essentially came down to, "Don't come after me or my family! It wasn't my fault!"

     Although, it certainly wasn't for lack of trying, as we all know Pence conferred with former VP Dan Quayle to see if he could get around Trump's wrath and that of his rabid supporters. Of course, outside the Federalist Society's hogan of cigar smoke and bullshit, Pence's speech last Friday did absolutely nothing to improve his standing with the alternate dimension known as MAGA World any more than does Cheney's and Kinzinger's unwavering stand for democracy as least as far as January 6th is concerned.

     Because on Friday, the GOP officially became the party of One Man, a man who's losing his grip on that party with each passing day. And, to this new, Nazified GOP, credibility matters all of a sudden not because it's an asset but because it views it as a threat.